
Class QL£<9% 

Book_ fi &CH A 
GopyrightN 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



T 



THE BEE PEOPLE 



15 u ifliss 


fttorleu 


£1.25. 


A Song of Life. 


12mo. 


Life and Love. 


12mo. 


51.25. 


The Bee People. 


l2mo. 


$1.25. 


A. C. McCLURG AND CO. 


Chic 


ago. 





THE 



BEE PEOPLE 



BY 



/ 



MARGARET WARNER MORLEY 

Author of 
" A SONG OF LIFE," "LIFE AND LOVE," ETC. 



JJHujJttatcb bp tfre 2Cutfjor 




CHICAGO 

A. C. McCLURG AND COMPANY 

1899 



1 



- 



31253 



Copyright 
By A. C. McClurg & Co. 

A.D. 1899 




QL 






CONTENTS. 



Page 

INTRODUCTION 9 

Chapter 

I. APIS MELLIFICA, OR THE HONEY-BEE ... 17 

II. APIS MELLIFICA AND HER EYES 23 

III. HER TONGUE 28 

IV. HER HONEY-SAC 41 

V. AMBROSIA AND NECTAR 45 

VI. MISS APIS'S LEGS 48 

VII. HER WINGS 61 

VIII. HOW SHE HEARS AND SMELLS 65 

IX. HER STING 74 

X. MISS APIS AND HER SISTERS 85 

XI. THE BROTHERS 88 

XII. THE QUEEN 93 

XIII. THE WORK IN THE HIVE.— THE MANUFAC^ 

TURE OF WAX 102 

XIV. HONEY-COMB 108 

XV. HONEY AND HONEY-DEW 120 

XVI. CRADLE-CELLS 128 

XVII. THE FAMILY EXODUS 144 

XVIII. THE NEW QUEEN 147 

XIX. SOME ODD NOTIONS ABOUT BEES 155 

XX. BOMBUS, THE BUMBLE-BEE 163 



Introduction. 



Introduction. 

BEES and flowers belong together. We 
cannot understand the one without the 
other. For, you see, bees get their food 
from the flowers, and the flowers need the 
bees to enable them to form their seeds. 

The flowers that we like best have bright- 
colored petals. The petals of a rose are 
pink or white or yellow. The petals of a 
violet are purple, and those of a forget-me- 
not are blue. 

Sometimes the petals are separate, as in 
a rose or a buttercup, and you can pull them 
off one by one. 

Sometimes they are all grown into one 
piece, like the funnel-shaped flower of the 
morning-glory. 

The bees can see the bright colors of the 
flowers a long way off. They can also 



IO 



The Bee People. 



smell them, for bright flowers are generally 
fragrant. 

Flowers make a sweet juice on purpose 
to feed bees and other insects. We call this 





The Wild Rose, with five 
separate petals. 



The Morning-Glory, with the 
petals grown together into 
a funnel. 



sweet juice nectar, and the bees take it 
home and make honey of it. 

The flowers like to have the bees come 
and take the nectar. Why, do you sup- 
pose ? If you have studied flowers, you 
will know ; if you have not, I must try to 
tell you. 

You know there is a yellow dust in some 
flowers. It gets on your face when you 
smell of them. Sometimes flower dust is 



Introduction. 



ii 




brown and sometimes it is white. If you 
shake a golden-rod in the fall, a cloud of 
yellow golden-rod dust will fly out.fl^This 
dust is called pollen. 

Nearly all flowers have^ 
it. It grows in little box- 
es called anthers; and 
when the anthers are ripe,\ 
they burst open and lef 
pollen. 

You know how the anthers in a lily look/ 
They swing on the ends of the six long 
slender stems that stick out of the lily flower. 

Nearly all flowers have anthers, but some 
do not have stems to the anthers. Some- 
times the anthers grow right against the 
inside of the flower, but wherever they may 
be they always contain pollen. 
^^^Jn the centre of the flower is another part 
th^U looks a little like an anther ; its stem is 
long\and it is marked stigma in the picture. 
This sf\igma is not filled with pollen. It 
is just a sr^icky knob. 



12 The Bee People. 

When it gets ripe it gets sticky. If any 
pollen touches it, the pollen sticks fast. If 
you take away the petals and the anthers 
and their stems from the lily, this is what 
you will have left. 

You see it is the stigma and its long 
stem, and there is another knob at the other 
end of the stem opposite the stigma. This 
other knob is hollow. It is a seed-cup and 
is filled with seeds. The seeds cannot 
grow without pollen. 

If the pollen gets on the stigma, then all 
goes well. The sticky stigma holds it fast. 
It finds its way down through the long 
stem to the little seeds. It nourishes them, 
and they grow. But if the pollen does not 
come, the seeds die. 

Flowers do not like their own pollen. 
One lily prefers the pollen from another lily. 

It is better for the seeds. But how get 
this pollen? 

Why, ask the hairy-coated bees to bring 
it, to be sure. 



Introduction. 13 

And now you see why the flower makes 
nectar. 

It wishes to coax the bees to come. 
When the bees go down to the bottom of 
the flower after nectar, they will be sure to 
get their coats dusty with pollen. Then 
they fly to another flower, and some of the 
pollen on their coats is rubbed against the 
stigma and stuck fast there. 

The nectar is always placed so that the 
bees have to touch the anthers and the 
stigma of the flower on their way to 
the feast. 

Many flowers have bright lines or spots 
leading to the nectar that the bee may lose 
no time in finding it. These are called 
nectar guides, and you can see them very 
plainly in the morning-glory. 

Many other insects besides bees visit 
flowers. Butterflies and moths and flies 
and even some beetles are fond of nectar 
and pollen, and they all carry pollen about 
from plant to plant 



14 The Bee People. 

When insects carry pollen to the stigmas, 
we say they fertilise the flowers. Unless a 
flower is fertilized, it will bear no seed. 

Bees eat pollen as well as honey, and 
while gathering it from different flowers 
they are sure to dust the stigmas. 

Flowers can be fertilized only by pollen 
from other flowers of their own kind. 
Lilies can be fertilized only by pollen from 
other lilies, and roses by the pollen of other 
roses. Lily pollen cannot fertilize a rose, 
nor can any pollen fertilize any flower but 
one of its own particular kind. 

The three chief parts of a bee are the 
head, the thorax, and the abdomen. 

The head bears the antennae, tongue, and 
eyes. 

The thorax has attached to it the wings 
and legs. 

In the abdo- 
men are the 




-^n^sting and the 
honey-sac 



The Bee People. 




The Bee People. 

? 

i. 

APIS MELLIFICA, OR THE HONEY-BEE. 

HPHE honey-bees are buzzy, fuzzy little 
* pepper-pots. 

They have pretty, shining wings, but if 
you so much as touch one of them you 
will see what happens! 

You cannot wonder that they do not 
like to have you come too near, for they 
are such little creatures that even a small 
child must seem to them like a tremendous 
giant. 

How would you like to see a great warm 

creature as large as a hill come lumbering 

up and try to put a finger the size of a 

church steeple upon you? 
2 17 



i8 



The Bee People. 



I am sure you would do anything to keep 
it away, and if you had a good sharp sting 
you would use it. So we must not blame 
the Bee People for stinging us. 

It is the only way they have of telling us 
to keep away and let them alone. 

They are friendly enough to their own 
relations, as you will agree when you learn 
that there are sometimes as many as sixty 
thousand of them living happily together in 
one family. 

Sometimes we build houses, which we 
call hives, for them, and sometimes they 
live in a hollow tree in the woods. 

The hives we usually make in these days 
are square-cornered boxes that can be opened 



^ 


= 7~ — - 


— "li 


Is 


m=~~£iE 


M 


« * 


===~ 




«v" 








~~ ^ — 






ft 




0^ 




/ hi\ 



^gw*is*vu vqn^^rwKSSK 




Modern 
Hives. 



The Honey-Bee. 



19 



to take out the honey or to attend to the 
bees. In some parts of the country an old- 
fashioned hive called a 




Bee 
Gums, 



- -r 

" bee gum " is still used. If you go to the 
mountains of North Carolina, you will see a 
great many bee gums. Nearly every cabin 
has a row of them in its yard, and they are 
made by chopping down hollow sweet- 
gum trees and cutting off lengths of about 
three feet. 

Sometimes other hollow trees are used, 
but they are all called "gums." The moun- 
taineers stand the " gum " on a board or a 
stone, and put another board or stone on 
top for a roof. All the holes are plastered 



20 



The Bee People. 



up with mud except those near the bottom, 
where the bees go in and out. The mud is 
used to keep out moths, which otherwise 
might get in and spoil the honey-combs. 

A row of bee gums standing beside a log 
cabin on a mountain-side is very pretty. 

A skep is a hive made 
£>f twisted straw, and 
in old times was 
used more than 
fcjjjfr^ any other, 
particularly 
Lin England. 
skeps. It had a pe- 

culiar shape, and to this day when we say a 
thing is hive-shaped, we mean it is shaped 
like the skep. 

Once in a while honey-bees make their 
home in the hollow walls of a building, and 
there is a house in a New England city 
where bees have lived for a number of 
years. They are under the roof somewhere, 
and there they stay safe, and year after 




The Honey-Bee, 21 

year store up honey which nobody can 
reach. Stories are told of old houses whose 
hollow walls, when they were pulled down, 
were found to be filled with honey-combs. 
It is not easy to get honey that is stored 
in the walls of houses, as the bees fight 
bravely for their property. 

Honey-bees are small people, being only 
about twice as large as common house-flies. 

Some are brown all over, and some that 
were brought here from Italy have tan-col- 
ored abdomens, but all of them, the brown 
bees, the Italian bees, and the other kinds of 
hive bees in this country, are called by the 
same name, Apis Mellifica. Apis is the 
Latin word for bee, and mellifica is the 
Latin word for honey-making; and they 
have this pretty name because they make 
and store up quantities of good honey, 
which we like to eat. 

The Bee People are sun-lovers, and all 
summer long on bright days you may see 
them hurrying about. But in the winter- 



22 



The Bee People. 



time you would look in vain for them, no 
matter how brightly the sun might shine, 
for they are the Friends of the Flowers and 
seldom leave home except when there are 
blossoms for them to visit. 

Many flowers keep a dainty table spread 
for the bees. Cups of nectar and dishes of 
ambrosia are ready for them to eat and drink 
and carry home. 

If it were not for these gifts from the 
flowers, the I honey-bees could not live, as 




White Clover, from which a great deal of honey is made. 




II. 



APIS MELLIFICA AND HER EYES. 



HERE comes a little brown lady whose 
name is Apis Mellifica. She is mak- 
ing her wings go so fast that they buzz 
like a humming-top. Straight as an ar- 
row she goes to that morning-glory flower. 
All at once the buzzing stops; little 
Miss Apis has landed feet down and 
right side up on the nectar guide. 

Such great eyes as stare at you 
when you look her full in the 
face ! No wonder she saw the. 
bright flower a long way 
off and came"^\straighj 
to it. 

She has more 
eye-space for her sizei 





24 The Bee People. 

than an owl, which is saying a good deal. 
In fact, her head looks as if it were nearly all 
eyes, — for two large ones cover the sides. 
And if you will believe me, in the space 
between the two large eyes, right on top of 
her head, are three small ones! 

Unless you shave Miss Apis's 
head you can see but one of 
(these small eyes at a time, as 
'there is a tuft of hairs in front 
Miss Apis's face, of each, which hides it unless 
you are looking right down into it. In 
the picture Miss Apis's head has been 
shaved. 

Five eyes! 

But that is not all. Each of her two large 
eyes is made up of about six thousand three 
hundred very small ones. 

Really, Miss Apis, twelve thousand six 
hundred and three eyes are a goodly supply 
for one bee. 

It is fortunate that she does not have to 
keep count of them, for if she counted an 



Miss Apis and Her Eyes. 25 

eye every second it would take almost four 
hours to get to the end, without stopping 
to take a sip of honey, or even to say, Oh, 
dear me! 

How would you like your mother to look 
at you out of more than twelve thousand 
eyes when you had been doing something 
naughty? Two eyes are bad enough at 
such times. Let us hope that young bees 
never do wrong. 

Just imagine a naughty little bee looking 
up to find twelve thousand six hundred 
small eyes and three large ones solemnly 
staring at his wickedness ! 

The truth is, all the thousands of small 
eyes that make up each large eye work 
together and act as one eye. 

Miss Apis's large eyes are called " com- 
pound eyes " because they are made of so 
many small eyes, or "facets." 

The facets are so very small that you 
cannot see them except by the aid of a 
microscope ; and here is a picture showing 




26 The Bee People. 

you a portion of the eye considerably 
magnified. 

Whoever goes as far as Miss Apis does 
in search of flowers needs good eyes that 
can see a long distance. She has been 
known to fly four or five miles in 
search of flowers; just think of going, 
back and forth from hive tog 
flowers and flowers to hive^ 
any such distance as that 
As a rule, however, Miss Apis goes only a 
little way, half a mile or so, but even for 
this she needs good, far-seeing eyes. 

And she has them, — for her compound 
eyes are very far-sighted. 

This is probably the reason she needs 
the three small eyes, which are near- 
sighted and enable her to see things close 
at hand. 

Although she possesses such a prodigious 
number of eyes, Miss Apis has no eyelids. 
No, indeed ! she has eye-hairs instead, that 
point outward and do not prevent her see- 



Miss Apis and Her Eyes, 27 



ing, but keep dust and pollen from getting 
into her eyes. 

If you look back at the picture of the 
facets, you will see some of these hairs. 
She combs her eyes every time she combs 
her head, and this does not seem 
at all funny to her, for, you see, 
she is used to it. 





III. 

HER TONGUE. 



MEANTIME, while we have been gos- 
siping about Miss Apis's eyes, she 
has gone off. 

There she is, just landing in another 
morning-glory blossom. She strikes the 
nectar guide as a >^shot strikes the bull's 
eye, then iC#^4^ 0wn s ^ e tumbles to 
the M^^^^O^ibottom of the ^ff^ 
flower.l\^^^^^^\Here are thej^/# 
nectar/,4, ^^aps^^^k five^*^!^/ of 

sweet clear nectar, for it is early in the 
morning, and Miss Apis is the first to arrive. 
She wants this nectar to carry home and 

make into honey, but how is she going to 

28 



Miss Apiss Tongue. 29 

get her head into the tiny openings that 
lead to the nectar? 

You need not worry about that. She 
knows what to do, and all at once produces 
a long shining brown tongue and 
thrusts it deep down into the nectar. 
Here is a morning-glory that must 
v have had an X-ray turned upon it, 
for we can see right through it to 
where Miss Apis is reaching 
her brown tongue down to 
the nectar. 

This tongue is almost as queer as her 
eyes. Not that she has twelve thousand 
six hundred tongues. Oh, no; one tongue 
like hers is quite enough, as you probably 
will agree when you know r 
more about it. 

.... . . ZJL- --— Enjoying a 

It is a long tongue and a - drop of honey. 
strong tongue, and curls about, lapping up 
the sweetness, as you can see for yourself 
if you catch her and give her a drop of 
honey. 





30 The Bee People. 

But now she has licked the morning-glory 
dry and — but what has she done with her 
tongue ? 

It was almost as long as her body a 
moment ago, and now it is gone. 

Miss Apis, what have you done with 
your tongue? 

Where is your tongue, Miss Apis} 

MISS APIS, MISS APIS! YOUR TONGUE, 
MISS APIS? 

But she only looks at us out of her 
twelve thousand six hundred large eyes and 
her three small eyes, and says not a word. 

Her tongue is all right, and she knows 
how to hold it. 

There, she is going to speak I Buzz — 
b-u-z-z-zz. No, that is her wing music; 
her tongue is still silent. Off she goes and 
leaves us in despair concerning it. Now 
she has deposited herself in another flower 
— and sure enough — yes — there is that 
1-o-n-g, b-r-o-w-n tongue wriggling around 
in the nectar cup. 



Miss Apiss Tongue. 31 

I will catch hold of it and pull it, Miss 
Apis, if you do not tell me what you did 
with it. 

Will you ? she seems to say, solemnly 
looking at us out of her twelve thousand 
six hundred and three eyes. 

No, we will not, because it is gone again. 

I think, in spite of her solemn and owl- 
like looks, she is laughing at us. 

Saucy Miss Apis, what do you do with 
your tongue ? 

" I know what you do with yours," she 
seems to say, and flies off. 

But now I know. I saw her do it. She 
pulled it in, just as you do yours when you 
have put it out of your mouth. But hers 
is such a large tongue it could not be pulled 
into her mouth at all. The best she could 
do was to pull it up as short as possible, 
and then fold it back into a nice little 
groove under her head. 

It is a very useful tongue and a very 
queer one. It has to reach down into long 



The Bee People. 




flower-cups, and so it must be long. It has 
to lap up honey, and so it must be flexible. 
It has to find its way through very small 
\openings, and so it must be as 
slender as a thread. 

It often has to come into con- 
tact with the hard parts of flowers 
and plants, and so it must be 
protected. 

It is protected by two hard horny 
tT sheaths, — one covering the upper 
side of the tongue, (t) ; the other covering 
the lower side. The lower sheath is made 
of two long pieces, x, x, that can 
be separated, as you see in the 
picture. Each has a little feeler 
F at the end. Usually they lie 
side by side with their edges over- 
lapping, underneath the tongue. Theyi 
make a little trough in which the 
tongue lies, as you see in this next* T 
picture. They protect the under side of 
the tongue. 








Miss Apis's Tongue. 33 

The upper sheath is also made of two 
horny pieces Y, Y, that can be separated 
from each other. They lie side by side 
when not separated, and their in- ,^ v T'v 
ner edges overlap, so that they/ 
form a covering to the upper 
side of the tongue. So, you 
see, when the two sheaths are ift 
their right places they make a tube 
about the tongue, and the tongue is 
run out at the point of the sheaths when 
the bee wants to lick up nectar. 

Miss Apis has her tongue-sheath sepa- 
rated into so many parts for a very good 
reason. 

If the sheath were a closed tube, pieces of 

honey-comb or grains of pollen or other 

substances might get wedged in, when she 

was licking up honey or nectar, and give 

her a great deal of trouble. But as it is, if 

anything gets caught, all she has to do is to 

separate the parts of her tongue-sheath and 

clear it out. 

3 



34 The Bee People. 

Miss Apis's tongue is surrounded by rings 
of hairs which hold fast the nectar and 
enable her to draw it up into her mouth 
through the tube made by her tongue- 
sheaths. 

The very tip of her tongue is like a little 
round plate and helps her to lick up the 

M^^^k You see by now that Miss 

nwP^ -m A P is ' s t° n ? ue is a very sweet 
I ^^^y| tongue, in fact, a honeyed 
\ ^W^ I tongue, as we might say. We 
speak of poets and orators as having honeyed 
tongues,. but I leave it to you if any^of 
them can equal Miss Apis in this^ 

If you look in Miss Apis's face 
when she is not eating, you can- 
not see her tongue at all, as it is 
folded back under her head. 

You can see her tightly closed jaws, 
j, j, and her upper lip, but not her tongue: 

Here she has opened her jaws and let 
her tongue down between them, but you 




Miss Apis's Tongue. 



35 



can see only the upper sheath and the two 
little feelers that grow on the points of the 
lower sheath. 

In this next picture she has pushed her 
tongue out below the sheaths, 
as she does when licking up 
honey or nectar that is easily 
reached. 

If the nectar is hard to get at 
she needs a longer tongue, and 
therefore shoots the under sheath out 
below the upper one. 
When she does this her tongue is not so 
fH^ell protected, but ^^)feg 
it is longer, as you t f\\ [: 
can see in this 
next picture. 
When the tongue is' 
not in use, it is drawn 
up as short as possible, Si ^ f e jj^ 
and then is folded back f h p e is ^ e g a u d e w ^ 
into a groove on the folded back, 
under-side of Miss Apis's head, something 







36 The Bee People. 

as a boy shuts his knife-blade into the 
handle. 

Getting honey is very easy where it is 
in open cups, but sometimes the flower 
sweets are in the bottoms of tubes too long 
for the bee's tongue to reach them. 

What is she to do in such a case ? When 
she smells a delicious meal which she can- 
not reach, shall she pass by 
with a sigh because she can 
not get it? Sometimes 
Bumbie-Bee. s i ie j s obliged to, but some- 
times she is helped by the bumble-bees. 

These are much larger than honey-bees; 
and you will know them because they are 
covered all over with hair, as if they had on 
furry coats. Honey-bees have very little 
hair on the body below the waist. Bumble- 
bees have broad bands of yellow hairs across 
their bodies, and sometimes the whole thorax, 
or part between the head and waist, is bright 
yellow. Bumble-bees can always be found 
in red clover fields. Their horny tongue- 



Miss Apis's Tongue. 37 

sheaths are larger and stronger than the 
sheaths of the honey-bee. Indeed, they 
make quite a strong little dagger with 
which Madam Bombus, the bumble-bee, can 
cut a hole in a flower. 

When Madam Bombus finds a flower with 
sweets which she cannot reach without 
taking too much trouble, she goes to the 
spot beneath which the sweet she wants is 
concealed, and, with a downward blow of her 
convenient dagger, rips open the interven- 
ing membrane. Then she unfurls her flag in 
triumph. In this case her flag is her tongue, 
you understand. She inserts it in the hole 
she has made and licks out the sweet juice. 

After she is gone, comes the turn of Miss 
Apis, who puts her tongue through the hole 
that her larger and stronger friend has made, 
and takes her share also. 

Since the nectaries of the flowers usually 
fill up as soon as the bees have licked them 
out, Miss Apis may gd as much honey as 
though Madam Bombus had not taken any. 



38 The Bee People. 

It is too bad for the bumble-bee to break 
into the flowers as she does, and we are 
almost ashamed of Miss Honey-Bee for 
following such a bad example. 

It is the flowers with spurs that Madam 
Bombus is most apt to treat in this ungra- 
cious/' manner. I myself have seen her 
goup/ jg||P ^^^ to a tidy little touch- 
me-not cup, and 
passingstraight 
by the open door in 
^ front, cling to the yellow 
T '/ spur at the back, which 
The tidy little holds the nectar, and 
with no hesitation what- 
ever thrust her sharp little dagger into the 
spur, slit a hole there, and take out the nectar. 
It is difficult to believe this of a very 
respectable-looking being with several thou- 
sands of solemn eyes that make her look 
many times as wise as an owl, but it only 
proves how little one can rely upon appear- 
ances in this world. 




Miss Apiss Tongue. 39 

It is very unwise for Madam Bombus to do 
such a thing, as well as very unkind ; for by 
going* in at the front door she would pre- 
serve the lives of the flowers that feed her. 

When she goes about slitting open necta- 
ries, she injures not only herself but all her 
fellow-bees ; for bees carry pollen from 
flower to flower, as you very well know, 
and this pollen is necessary to the forming 
of the seeds. When the bees go into a 
flower as they ought, they carry some of 
the pollen that has rubbed off against their 
hairy bodies to the next flower they visit, 
which is just what the flowers need. But 
when they break open the nectaries from 
the outside, they do not get dusted with 
pollen, and do not carry it to other flowers. 
No pollen, no seeds; no seeds, no more 
plants ; so now you understand why the 
bees make such a mistake when they cut 
nectaries open. 

The honey-bees seldom do this, not be- 
cause they are better than the bumble-bees, 



4 o 



The Bee People. 



but because they are not able. Their dagger 
sheath is not strong enough. I once saw 
a honey-bee try very hard to cut a hole in 
the long tube of a purple azalea. She could 
not reach the nectar from the front of the 
flower, because the tube was too long and 
slender, so she tried to break in the back 
way. But she could not do it, and all the 
azalea nectar she got she sucked out of holes 
which the bumble-bees had made in some 
of the flowers. The az /alea did not make 

honey for the bees; 

its long and slender 

tube was fitted to 

the tongues of large 

moths and butterflies. 





IV. 



HER HONEY-SAC. 





WHAT do you suppose becomes of 
the nectar Miss Apis gathers with 
her hairy tongue ? She swallows it, you 
say, and that is true. She does swallow it, 
but that is not the end of the story. When 
it is swallowed, it passes into a little honey- 
sac which is not as large as a 
sweet-pea seed, and which is* 
so delicate that it looks like a little soap- 
bubble. 

This honey-sac is in the big end of the 
abdomen, and in the picture it is shown by 
a dotted circle. It holds less than a drop of 
nectar, and we may call it the jug or bottle 
in which Miss Apis carries the blossom 

nectar home ; for she does not swallow 
41 



42 The Bee People. 

it for her own use, but that she may bear 
it to the hive for the baby bees to eat. 

You can see this honey-sac by feeding a 
hive bee as much as she wants, and then 
letting her fly to the window. The light 
shining through the delicate body makes the 
clear honey in her little "bottle" plainly 
visible. The Italian honey-bees, whose ab- 
domens are a light tan color, at the upper 
end, show the honey-drop better than the 
common brown bees. 

Some of the honey passes on into the 
true stomach of the bee, which is just 
beyond the honey-sac, and is digested ; 
but the most of it Miss Apis carries to 
the hive in her honey-sac. 

It is curious that everything Miss Apis 
eats has to be swallowed into the honey- 
sac before it can get into the stomach, 
and yet the honey is always clear and 
pure. Honey and pollen go together into 
the honey-sac, yet the honey in the comb 
contains almost no pollen. 




Miss Apis's Honey-Sac. 43 

The reason is, Miss Apis strains her 
honey before she puts it in the comb. 

In her honey-sac is a little strainer which 
is very wonderful and very beautiful. 

It looks, as you can see in the picture, 
something like a flower-bud. Honey and 
pollen grains go together mio/C^2\ the 
honey-sac, but they : 
do not stay together, for the ' 
pollen grains are gathered up by the adion 
of muscles in the walls of the honey-sac, 
and passed through the strainer into the 
stomach. The strainer opens its mouth 
to let them pass, but as soon as they have 
done so, it closes. Of course quite a good 
deal of nectar passes through with the 
pollen, but this is squeezed back by the 
muscles of the stomach into the honey-sac 
through the closed mouth of the strainer. 
The mouth of the strainer is fringed with 
hairs that point backwards and cross each 
other when the strainer mouth is closed. 
So, though the nectar can squeeze through, 



44 



The Bee People. 



the pollen grains cannot. They are kept 
back in the stomach by this clever little 
strainer, and only pure nectar or honey can 
get back into the honey-sac. 

When Miss Apis gets to the hive, she 
makes the muscles of her honey-sac squeeze 
the honey into her mouth, and she then puts 
it into the honey-comb. 

Miss Apis swallows nectar, as the sweet 
juice of the flowers is called, but when we 
take ho JSkney from the honey-comb, it 

dergone a change and 

is no longer nectar, but 

honey. In some way the 

nectar has been changed 

and 

honey 



into 






V. 

MBROSIA AND NECTAR. 



OF course no one, not even Miss Apis 
nor the lovely Venus herself, could 
live entirely upon nectar. 

We know that the gods and goddesses, 
when they had a party on Mount Olympus, 
always had ambrosia as well as nectar. 

They sat around and had it passed to 
them by the graceful goddess Hebe. She 
was as beautiful as the springtime, and I 
have no doubt they often ate and drank 
more than was good for them, just for 
the sake of having her bring them one 
more cup of nectar or one more slice of 
ambrosia. 

The nectar of the gods was like honey ; 
some say that nine-tenths of it was honey. 

45 



46 The Bee People. 

Just what ambrosia was, I am not able to 
say, but I suppose it was like the best bread 
that ever was made on earth, only a great 
deal better; and like the most delicious 
cake that ever was concocted for Christmas 
time, only a great deal more delicious ; 
and like all the bonbons and good things 
rolled into one, only a great deal sweeter 
and finer than anything we can possibly 
imagine. 

Miss Apis, too, takes ambrosia with her 
nectar, though hers is not at all like that 
of the gods and goddesses. She gets it 
from the flowers, and is very fond of it, 
though we do not agree with her con- 
cerning the excellence of her feast. But 
then we might not like the ambrosia the 
gods were so fond of. Tastes differ. Her 
ambrosia just suits Miss Apis. In fact, 
she finds it so much to her mind that she 
seldom eats anything else. She drinks 
nectar and eats ambrosia. Her nectar is 
the sweet juice of the flowers, and her 



Ambrosia and Nectar. 



47 



ambrosia is the pollen of the flowers, — a 
very precious ambrosia indeed. 

Miss Apis not only eats all she wants 
when she visits the flowers, but she mixes 
nectar and pollen together and carries them 
away with her. 

|^_^ She is able to do this, for she al- 
ways carries baskets on purpose. 
She never yet was known to go away 
from home and forget to 
take her pollen baskets. 






VI. 



MISS APIS S LEGS 





HE reason Miss Apis never forgets her 

baskets is, that they are fastened on 

40^ to her. For, I must tell 

|| her legs are as remarkable as 

her twelve thousand six hun- 




dred and three eyes, her 

folding tongue, and her 

very peculiar honey- 





---^rxzoset 



;s- i^Xo^yCL^f, 



She has six legs fastened to 
her thorax, which you re- 
member is the division of 
her body next back of her head. 

Although she is so well supplied with 
legs, she has no arms; since she has no 

arms, she has no hands. 

4 8 



GUtnjLcrrrLe^T^^ 



Miss Apis's Legs. 49 

That seems rather unfortunate, and we 
are inclined to be sorry for her, but I 
doubt if she would thank us for feel- 
ing so. 

She probably feels sorry for us because 
we have not six legs, and wonders how 
we get along with only two to prop us up 
and help us to go about, with not even 
wings to help. For besides six legs, Miss 
Apis has four wings. They are wonder- 
ful wings ; but we must return to legs. 

Since Miss Apis has no hands, she 
uses all six legs, or rather the claws at 
the ends of them, for clinging fast to 
things. 

She also uses all six legs to walk and 
run with, and once in a while, when 
under great excitement, to jump a little. 

The claws at the ends of her legs are 
not ordinary claws such as cats or hens 
have ; there is nothing ordinary about Miss 
Apis, I must remind you, not even her 
claws. 



5o 



The Bee People. 



dcuii 



In this picture you can see Miss Apis's 

foot and the claw at the end very plainly. 

The truth is, she has been sitting with 

her foot under the microscope, 

and if you will believe me, picture 

\ number II. is just what you see in 

'v. the circle in picture number I., 

>f ,rTpr only number II. is very much 

/ magnified. 

The claw at the end, as you see in 
picture number II., is made of 
four sharp points, two long and 
two short ones. 
There is a claw like this 
V at the end of each of Miss 
Apis's six feet. 

They are as good as a whole box of 
tools, being a great deal better than hands 
and fingers for doing some of the things 
she is in the habit of doing. Between 
the points on each foot is a small pad 
(+), that can stick fast to smooth sur- 
faces like the pad on a fly's foot, and 








Miss Apis's Legs. 51 

so enable Miss Apis to walk on slippery 
places if she wants to. 

Her foot is made of four very mov 
able joints besides the claw, and this / - 
enables her to curl it about objects so J 
as to get a better grasp of them. 

When she pleases she can turn up 
her claws and use them as hooks by 
which to suspend herself. You will 
see later that it is very important for 
her to be able to hang herself up when 
she wishes. 

But what have her legs to do with 
pollen baskets? you are asking. 

They have a great deal to do with 
them, for Miss Apis carries her baskets 
on her hind legs. 

Oh, well, laugh if you want to. I 
have known people before who laughed 
too soon. 

I wonder where you would fit pollen 
baskets to Miss Apis if you had it 
to do? 






52 The Bee People. 

Probably you would put them on her 

head, where she could not see because of 

them, and where she could not reach 

where the pollen would 

be always spilling out, 

if she ever succeeded in 

getting any in. 

But, 1 can tell you, you might 

iss Apis over from top to toe, and 

ijljy you would not find another place as good 

f as her hind legs for disposing of pollen 

j baskets. 

^ Each of her legs has ten joints. There 
,0 are two small ones (1, 2) close to the body, 
which are very much alike on all the legs. 
Then comes a long joint (?) which is quite 
similar in all six legs ; then comes a second 
long joint (4) which is very curious. 

The fifth joint is also interesting. 6, 7, 
8, 9, are the small joints forming the foot, 
and 10 is the last joint of all, or the claw. 

Miss Apis carries her pollen baskets on 
the outside of the fourth joint of each of 



Miss Apis's Legs. 53 

her hind legs. As she walks about, they 
are not in her way She does not spill 
the pollen, and she can easily reach the 
baskets with her other leg's when she 
wants to fill jthem. 

The outside of the joint is hollowed a 
little, and along the outer edge of this 
hollow space are stiff hairs that turn 
towards the middle and make a very com- 
plete little basket to hold the pollen that 
is put into it. 

Miss Apis has been kind enough to sit 
with her left hind leg under the micro- 
scope and have its picture taken, so we 
can see the pollen basket very clearly. 

The large leg at the left of Miss Apis 
is the magnified picture of the leg in the 
circle. 

If you look at her with a little hand- 
magnifying glass, you can get quite a good 
view of her pollen baskets. 

How do you suppose Miss Apis gets the 
pollen which she puts into her baskets ? 



54 The Bee People. 

If you look at her body and at the upper 
part of all her six legs, you will find them 
covered with long" hairs. If you look at 
the hairs under a magnifying glass you will 
find them branched, as you see in the 
picture. 

When Miss Apis wants pollen she scrapes 
it from the anther cells with her claws, and 
gathers it together with her legs. 
Very often her whole body becomes 
dusted with it, and wherever the 
pollen grains touch the branched 
hairs they cling fast to them. 
Miss Apis wriggles about 
in the flowers, scraping out the 
pollen with her feet, and collecting 
it on her branched hairs. Then she 
carefully brushes it together, and by 
means of her legs transfers it to her pollen 
baskets. 

For you must know she has a num- 
ber of brushes on her legs to help her 
to gather up the pollen. 





Miss Apis's Legs. 55 

These brushes are tufts or rows of stiff 
hairs that are not branched. 

If we look on the under side of her hind 
leg", the same that bears the pollen basket 
on the fourth joint of its upper side, we 
shall see two kinds 
of brushes or combs 
for gathering the pol- 
len together, the stiff 
hairs on the edge of the fourth joint, and 
the sharp teeth that cover the fifth joint. 
Each hind leg is supplied with these use- 
ful brushes, and one hind leg scrapes the 
pollen into the basket of the other. 

The first chance you gtt you must watch 
Miss Apis gathering pollen. Sometimes 
she looks as if she were running about over 
a head of flowers to find something she 
had lost,— now this way and now that she 
goes in a great hurry, then turns around 
and around. But she has not lost anything, 
and she has not gone crazy ; she is merely 
collecting pollen as fast as she can, and if 



56 The Bee People. 

you have sharp eyes you will see her rub, 
rub, rubbing it with her legs back into her 
baskets. 

It is astonishing how much she can carry. 
When her baskets are full she goes about 

with a ball of pollen 
attached to each of her 

hind legs. 
If she goes into morn- 
^\^W ing-glory blossoms, this pollen 




'i 



full pollen basket 



ball is white; if she happens to 
be visiting wood-lilies, it is dark reddish 
brown; and if she has been going to see 
the sweet-peas, it is bright yellow. She 
carries it to the hive and stores it up there 
for the young bees and for winter use, and 
it soon assumes a uniform dark brown color. 
There is nothing neater than a bee. It 
disturbs her terribly to have a dirty face or 
a dusty wing, and she is forever cleaning 
herself. 

If you look along the outer edge of the 
fifth joint on her front leg, you will see her 



Miss Apiss Legs. 



57 



eye-comb. She has to keep the pollen and 
dust combed out of her eye-hairs — or else 
how could she see? And when she is 
combing l ier ^/ e y ess ' le ^^^fe. evidently 
thinks she^^K^^^^^W'may just as 
well, beingy^fflj^pk ' ' |ipa very neat 
person, co f lly f mb her/y head also. 

She cleans off her vel myety thorax with 
the brushes on her middle if* legs, where 
she also carries a prong for preening her 
wings, and for prying the pollen out of her 
baskets. You can see this prong on the 
inside of her middle leg at the bottom of the 
fourth joint. You see the 
pollen is really the flour from 
which she makes her bee 
bread, or ambrosia, as it is I 
sometimes called. As she collects it she 
moistens it with honey so that it can be 
kneaded into a sticky mass, like dough, and 
thus packed securely in her baskets. 

All her legs have brushes, and when 
she is pollen-gathering you can see her 





58 The Bee People. 

dusting every part of her body with these 
brushes. 

Over her head she passes the brushes on 
her fore legs, over her back and under her 
body she passes the brushes on her middle 
legs. 

Then she rubs her legs together to collect 
the pollen on the combs of the hind legs. 

Since she gathers the flour for her bread 
on the hair of her body, she is obliged to 
keep herself very, very clean, so all the 
leg brushes are also toilet brushes, and are 
used to keep her clean as well as to gather 
pollen. 

The most remarkable of her toilet articles 
are her antenna cleaners, but their story 
comes later. 

It is much easier to watch Miss Apis per- 
forming her toilet than it is to distinguish 
her various combs and brushes. If you wet 
her a little, then dust her lightly with flour 
and put her on the window, you can see 
the whole operation. 



Miss Apis's Legs. 



59 



^ 



She generally cleans her antennae, and 
combs her head and eyes first. She turns 
her head from side to side, and puts her 
front leg up over it and draws her 
convenient comb through the 
hairs. She turns her head about, using first 
one front leg and then the other, until she 
has it as clean as a bee's head ought to be. 
She generally puts out her tongue and gives 
that a good rubbing too, grasp- 
p- ing it in both her fore feet. 
g^v=^=^ When you watch a bee 
performing her toilet you will understand 
why her legs are so beautifully jointed. 
She must be able to move them in all direc- 
tions, and put them over her back or under 
her body. 

She generally cleans her back with her 
middle legs; and her abdomen, 
as the last division of the body ~ 
is called, with her hind legs. 

She also uses her hind legs to 
|§|1S^ clean her wings, drawing down 





60 The Bee People. 

one wing at a time and holding it tightly 
against her side while she polishes it with 
her brushes. 

She spends a great deal of time rubbing 
her hind legs together, and 
sometimes she performs the 
^difficult acrobatic feat of standing 
on her two front legs and rubbing the other 
four together. 

She looks very cunning as she rubs and 
scrubs every part of her fuzzy little body; 
and if you want to see her do 
it, all you need do is to look. 

No matter how dirty she may have become, 
if she is allowed to stand still for a few 
minutes she will look as if she had on a new 
suit of clothes and had never known what 
it was to touch a speck of dirt ; so effective 
are her numerous brushes and combs. 





A Bee's Brush and Comb. 



VII. 



HER WINGS. 

POLLENLESS and honeyless Miss Apis 
leaves home. She returns with her sac 
full of honey and her baskets full of pollen. 

That is, if she is fortunate she returns, for 
I regret to say that certain birds, who ought 
to be ashamed of themselves, being fond of 
honey, 4ake it, bee and all. 

They do not stop her and say, "Your 
honey or your life ! " but swallow her whole 
and talk about it afterwards; that is, if they 
talk about it at all. 

Down their throat she goes, honey-sac 
and long brown tongue, twelve thousand 
six hundred and three eyes and curious legs, 
all at once. Not so much as an eye escapes, 
so far as I have ever heard. 

61 



62 The Bee People. 

Then these bad birds sit on a branch and 
" look as innercent as yer mammy's mockin' 
bird," as Uncle Remus would say, just as if 
they had never eaten a bee in their lives, 
nor even thought of such a thing". But if 
she^^^^js fortunate she gets home. 

mkdJW^ She does not walk home, 
^^^^^||iior yet run; she flies. 
^^^^^p/ For, as you know, she has 
^^^^^^^^wings. Dainty wings they are 
Sir a Bad Bird. too. They are transparent and 
//colorless like glass, and are very thin and 
delicate. They shine in the light, or you 
would scarcely notice them. 

Miss Apis seems to have only two wings, 
though really there are four of them. 

Whatever Miss Apis has she appears 
always to have in abundance ; and when 
wings are in question, she must needs have 
four, although birds and dragons and such 
economical creatures are content with two. 

She can fold her four wings down very 
neatly over her back when she wants to 



Miss Apiss Wings. 



63 



walk about, but when she starts to fly, 
she spreads them out, a pair on each side 

tof her body. ^||g 
the two wings Tf§M° n either 
ere to separate/wffromeach 
other and let the air between them, her flight 
would be. spoiled, and she would go tumbling 
along in an ungainly and mortifying manner. 
{That this may not happen, she 

hooks the 
upper 




•wings unhooked 




arge wing ^^i^and the lower 
small one together, when she raises them for 
flight, so that the two are as firm as though 
they were but one. She is enabled to, do 
this by a row of hooks on the lower wing 
which fit into a groove on the 
upper ^r^^S^^^^o 
wing, as 




•wings hooked 




you can see in the picture. The 
wings fit so closely together when hooked 
that you would not discover there were two, 
unless you looked very carefully indeed. 



64 The Bee People. 

With her wings safely locked together, 
away she goes, sure and swift. 

When she closes them, the smaller ones 
slip under the larger ones out of the way. 

You see, four wings are handy when one 
wants to close them and have them out of 
the way, but two are best to fly with. 

So, being a somewhat eccentric and 
withal ingenious individual, as you may 
have observed for yourself before this, Miss 
Apis has two wings to fly with, but four to 
fold away. 






VIII. 



HOW SHE HEARS AND SMELLS 



MISS APIS can hear and she can smell, 
though just how she hears, since she 
has no ears, and just how she smells, since she 
has no nose, puzzled people for a long time. 
The truth is, she is able to do these 
of 



things because 
you remember, 
ers that stand 
face. These 
ers, are jointed 




antennae, which, 
are the two feel- 
out from her 
|antennae or feel- 
1 having one 



long joint next the face, and a number of 
short joints forming a very movable tip. 
The long joint serves especially as an arm 
to move the many-jointed end about. 

If Miss Apis's eyes seem to us wonder- 
ful, what shall we think of her antennae? 
For though she has no ears, she has thou- 

* 6 5 



66 The Bee People. 

sands of what we might call "hearing- 
spots " on the short joints of her antennae. 
She also has thousands of " smell-hollows" 
on these remarkable antennae joints. The 
hearing-spots and smell-hollows are very, 
very small, so that we can see them only 
by means of the microscope. 

The antennae are also covered with short, 
sensitive hairs which make them very good 

4$1& feelers, able to tell Miss Apis 

Pr % what kind of substance she is 
^touching. They thus serve for 

End of An- eyes j n ^ ^ark fojy^ YOU WOUld 

tenna snowing J 

hairs - not think Miss Apis needed any 
more eyes, but one cannot expect absolute 
perfection in this world, even in eyes, or 
even in Miss Apis, and the truth is that 
Miss Apis's many eyes are probably unable 
to help her in the dark. 

Some creatures, like cats, can see in the 
dark, but Miss Apis is obliged to rely upon 
her antennae for information when she goes 
into a dark place. 



Haw She Hears and Smells* 67 

So you see these antennae are very im- 
portant and valuable. But you have not 
yet heard all. When bees have anything 
to say to each other they say it by means 
of their antennas. Just how this is done I 
cannot say, as I do not know. But they 
manage it somehow. 

When two bees meet they cross antennas 
in a friendly way, instead of shaking hands 
and asking after each-^g 
other's health ; that is, HoTdo^ou do" 
if they are friends, they do. If they are 
not members of the same family, I am sorry 
to say they fight. Two sisters, however, 
never fight. 

Miss Apis's very life depends upon her 
antennae. By means of them she hears, 
smells, discovers the nature of objects 
about her, and communicates with her 
fellow-bees. 

When she is awake her antennae are 
almost always in motion, and she is con- 
stantly touching the flowers with them, 



68 The Bee People. 

or examining everything with which she 
comes in contact. 

If anything happens to them, if they gtt 
broken off, or badly injured, poor little Miss 
Apis behaves very much like a rudderless 
boat at sea. She does not seem to know 
how to get anywhere, but moves about in 
an aimless sort of way. She does not eat 
or do her work, and in a short time she 
dies. 

Naturally these priceless helpers need to 
be well taken care of. Dust and pollen 
must not be allowed to clog up the hearing 
and smelling organs, nor interfere with the 
sensitive hairs. 

Since you have found Miss Apis provided 
with so many toilet articles, you will not be 
surprised that she has combs and brushes 
on purpose to keep her antennae clean. 

Yes, she has a comb and a brush on each 
front leg for that very purpose. You can 
see these curious little " antennae cleaners," 
as they are called, with the naked eye on 





How She Hears and Smells. 69 

the bumble-bee, and you can see them very 
well indeed with an ordinary magnifying 
glass. They are on the inside of the leg 
at x and A. 

There is a circular opening at A 
just large enough for the antennae 
to fit into. It is bordered by a sort of 
round comb, that reminds us of those' 
combs little girls sometimes wear. 
Only this comb is very small and the 
teeth point outward. 
At the end of the joint above, at x, 
a stiff flap hangs down. 

When the leg is bent the flap is 
brought down in front of the cir- 
cular opening, as you see in the 
picture. When Miss Apis wishes to 
clean her antenna, which is very often, she 
raises her leg above her head, and draws 
it down over her antenna, which slips into 
the circular opening. Then she bends her 
leg, the flap holds the antenna in place, and 
she draws that precious organ through the 





70 The Bee People, 

cleaner. The teeth in the round comb on 
one side and the sharp edges of the flap or 
brush on the other clean off every particle 
of dust. 

You can see her almost any time draw- 
ing first one antenna, then the other, 
^through the useful and remarkable 
4: little cleaners provided for the 
p^J^Sfe^^ purpose. She will often 
r ,stop in the middle of her honey- 
Antenna. gathering to do it, for she seems 
to feel uncomfortable if her antennae are 
not as clean as clean can be. 

The brush at S is used to clean out 
the round comb on the opposite leg. 

As you can imagine, it was a long 
time before people understood the uses 
of Miss Apis's antennae; but about two 
hundred years ago Mr. Francis Huber, a 
Swiss gentleman who loved bees, found 
out a part of the secret. He discovered 
that the honey-bee smells and feels with 
her antennae. 



How She Hears and Smells. 71 

All who love bees ought to know and 
love Huber, for he spent many, many 
years studying the bees and finding out 
wonderful things about them. 

I think you will like to hear his story. 

When only a boy he was very fond of 
nature, and very fond of study. He read so 
constantly that he ruined his eyes and when 
still a young man became blind. This did 
not stop his work, however, for he had two 
friends who were eyes for him. One was 
the young lady to whom he was engaged 
to be married. When he became blind, her 
friends tried to persuade her to leave him, 
but she would not. 

She insisted upon marrying him and tak- 
ing care of him. Huber and his wife lived 
in happiness for a great many years, and 
Huber said that he did not realize he was 
blind until his wife died. 

Huber's other friend was a man named 
Francis Burnens. Huber would tell Burnens 
just how to perform an experiment and just 



72 The Bee People. 

what to look for, and Burnens would do 
exactly as he was told, and then tell Huber 
all about it. In this way, Burnens did the 
seeing and Huber the thinking - . Burnens 
was very patient and careful, and once he 
spent eleven days, scarcely stopping to sleep, 
in examining every bee in two hives. 

Think what a task that was! I believe 
he drenched the bees with water so they 
would not sting, and then examined them 
one by one. It was owing to the careful 
work of Burnens that Huber was able to 
make a number of important discoveries 
about bees. 

A good many of the interesting facts we 
know to-day about bees we owe to blind 
Huber. He invented a hive which opened 
like the leaves of a book, so that he could 
at any time see what was going on inside, 
— or rather Burnens could see and tell him. 

People to-day sometimes use narrow hives 
with glass sides, so that everything the bees 
do can be watched. Some schools have 



How She Hears and Smells. 73 



such a hive fastened in a window; this is 
very interesting for the children. 

Bees do not willingly work in a light 
place, and they do not seem to enjoy being 
watched, so often they smear the sides of the 
glass hive all over with bee glue, which 
prevents curious eyes from looking in. 

Where bees are handled a good deal, they 
become quite tame. They seem to recognize 
their keeper. Bee-keepers very often have 
little machines by which they can puff smoke 
upon the bees. This does not hurt them, 
but makes them quiet, so the honey can be 
taken out and the bees handled. 





IX. 



HER STING. 

THER things than birds sometimes 
catch Miss Apis, toads and frogs, for 
stance, and sometimes boys do it ; but 
no boy catches her in his fingers with- 
out being punished for it. She has a 
dagger for such occasions, and it 
is not her tongue dagger 
either. It is as far from that 
|] as it can be, for it is at the 
extreme tip of her abdomen. 

Of, course, belonging to Miss 

Apis, it is a remarkable dag- 

j ger. Sharp ! My ! If 

( 1 you do not believe me, 

/// / just touch it. 

Sharpness, however, 

Be careful, Miss Apis ! is not UllUSUal ill dag- 

74 




Miss Apis's Sting, 75 

gers; all daggers are more or less sharp, 
though few as sharp as Miss Apis's. 

But the thing that distinguishes her 
dagger, and makes it more terrible 
than any other, is its barbs. Generally 
daggers are smooth, and make a clean 
cut, coming out as easily as they go 
in. Not so Miss' Apis's dagger. Al- 
though it is so tiny that we cannot 
see any barbs with the naked eye, 
still they are there. Instead of being 
smooth, it is fuller of barbs than a 
fish-hook, as you can see in the pic- 
ture, which is a very much enlarged Mi ^<4e[ s s 
view of Miss Apis's sting. For magnified. 
while an ordinary fish-hook has but 
one or two barbs, this little stinger has 
Xj ten pairs ! It is not an easy matter to 
dtoy" g" e t a fish-hook out of your finger if 
hook. ^ g e ts in beyond the barbs, as those of 
you who have ever had such an unpleasant 
experience know very well. If one pair of 
barbs hold so well, think how well ten pairs 



j6 The Bee People. 

must hold ! They hold altogether too well, 
as we shall see presently. 

Miss Apis's sting is not all in one piece, 
although it seems to be, and it requires very 
careful examination to discover that it is 
made of three parts. 

It is a sort of sheath with a groove run- 
ning its whole length. Into this groove fit 
two lances that can move up and down in 
the groove. When Miss Apis decides to 
sting you, she first drives the sharp point of 
her sheath into you. This has a few barbs 
to keep it from slipping out again. Then 
one after the other the lances, each with 
its ten strong barbs, are thrust in. Deeper 
and deeper they are forced until they are as 
deep in as they can go. After all, the 
wound they make is very, very small, no 
worse than the prick of a fine needle, in 
fact. Then why does it hurt so ? Ah, that 
is another question. 

Miss Apis's barbed sting reminds us of 
the ugly weapons sometimes used by 



Miss Apis's Sting. 



77 



-y 



savages, and like the cruel savages 
she too poisons her weapon. 

That is why it hurts us 
so. A jet of poison is 
pumped down the hollow 
'/sting from a poison bag 
f in her body, and is forced 
into the wound through 
an opening in the five lower 
barbs on each lance. So when Miss 
Apis stings us, we gtt ten jets of poison 
pumped into the little hole she makes in 
our skin. 

Miss Apis's pleasant weapon is 

her constant companion, and she 

is very free to use it, excepting when 

the aforementioned bad 

|f birds snap her up so 

quickly, and swallow 

/ n her down so fast, 

that she has 

not time to get 



Wild Black- 
' berry. 



i 



i 



I 



Vi 



/ 4 .1/ 



V 



over her surprise 



78 The Bee People. 

sufficiently to use her sting before she is 
a dead bee. 

You may think she never stings when 
she is dead, but I have heard otherwise. 
However, that is another story. The birds 
that swallow her must sometimes get stung, 
but they do not seem to object; perhaps 
they enjoy it. 

If you really want to know whether Miss 
Apis is willing to sting if she gets the 
chance, pick her up some day when she 
is getting nectar from a flower. 

You will learn several things. First, 
^? that the best thing 
.c^sptilpyou can do under 
lisSr the circumstances 

is to let her go as soon as possible, and 
pursue some other path to knowledge. 

But if you are a philosopher, you will 
not fail to observe what a very convenient 
position her sting occupies, as convenient 
for its purpose as the pollen-baskets are 
for theirs. She twists her jointed abdomen 




Miss Apiss Sting. 79 

about so that you will have hard work 
to take hold of her where she cannot 
plunge her sting into you. 

The entrance of this little sting gives rise 
to sensations out of all proportion to its size. 

A sting so small that you can hardly see it 
produces a pain so large that you do not 
seem to have room for any other feeling. 
Presently the spot about the tiny hole made 
by the sting begins to swell until it may be- 
come several times as large as Miss Apis her- 
self. That, you know, is because she takes 
good care to pump poison into the wound. 

This poison of hers is a reliable, warranted- 
never-to-fail irritant. If a whole hive of 
bees were to set upon you and sting you at 
once, you might be made very sick by it, as 
well as have to suffer great torture. 

It is said that people have even died from 
such mishaps. 

We see that little Miss Pepper-pot is not 
so innocent as she looks flying about among 
the flowers. 



So The Bee People. 

Still, as I said, you cannot blame her for 
using her sting, and if she ever does use it 
on you, do not get angry, but pull it out, 
then put some mud on the place and try to 
remember that when it stops hurting, you 
will feel better. 

Mud is a very good remedy, and, like Miss 
Apis's sting, is generally at hand. 

There is another consolation about get- 
ting stung; if it happens often enough, the 
sting in time ceases to poison you ! 

Your system seems to become used to 
the poison, so that it gradually loses its 
effect and its power to injure. 

Still, I should not advise any one to try 
this remedy ; it is too hard on the bees, — 
to say nothing of its unpleasant conse- 
quences to yourself. 

For poor little Miss Apis, with her many 
eyes, her honey-sac, her complicated tongue 
and legs and all the rest, pays a terrible 
penalty for losing her temper and stinging 
people. 



Miss Apis's Sting. 81 

You remember her sting is barbed like 
a fish-hook ; and if you have gone fishing 
much, you know how hard it is to pull a 
fish-hook out of anything into which it 
happens to get fastened. 

Well, when Miss Apis recklessly plunges 
ten pairs of barbs into the tough skin of 
your finger, she cannot pull them out again; 
and in her efforts to do so, out comes sting, 
poison-bag and all, and off she goes, hurt 
much worse than you are, for she will 
surely die as a result of her loss. 

She has left her poor savage little sting 
in your finger, much against her will, how- 
ever ; and your first care should be to extract 
it so as not to press out any more poison 
from the poison bag. 

This you can do by pressing the flat 
edge of a penknife against your skin 
close to the sting, but not touching it, 
and then drawing out the sting, just as 
you might take out a tack with a tack- 
hammer. 




rem Q\) ains in your finger 

1/^ muscles continue to 

k wo^rk, ^even though the sting is 

now entirely separated from the bee, 

and every bit of poison will be pumped 

out of the poison bag into your finger. 

So you see Miss Apis's sting continues 

to do the best it can, and to hurt you as 

much as possible, even after it has been 

completely torn from her body. 

In fact, if you touch a sting newly 
removed from a bee, you will get stung 
by it. There is no doubt that it is a 
very reliable weapon. 

In her fright and anger, Miss Apis does 
not stop to consider what will happen if 
she stings you, but stings first and thinks 

afterwards. 

82 




rst and 
gp- think "afterwards. One should 
alwWays think first and not sting at all, 
unle ss it becomes absolutely necessary. 

There are cases where one might better 
sting and die than live and not sting, but 
such cases are rare. 

The American Revolution is one of them, 
but that happened a long time ago and 
has nothing to do with bees, anyway. 

In spite of her reliable sting, Miss Apis 
is often eaten. 

A good many birds are fond of bees, 
and other creatures, particularly bears, eat 
them. 

It is truer to say that bears like honey, 
but they are willing to eat it, bees and all. 

Bears are great honey thieves, and there 

are many stories told of their efforts to 

83 



8 4 



The Bee People. 



get honey. They will upset hives, and 
do not seem to mind being stung at all. 

There is one story of a tame bear that 
used to take honey out of a bottle. He 
would lick out all he could reach, then 
turn the bottle up and let the honey run 
into his mouth. Usually it ran into his 
eyes as well, but that did not seem to 
trouble him. 

A good many creatures are fond of bees 
and honey, so you see dangers beset Miss 
Apis's path, and even the pleasant occu- 
pation of gathering sweets from flowers 
is not without its drawbacks. 




X. 

MISS APIS AND HER SISTERS. 

LADEN with pollen and nectar, Miss 
Apis starts homeward. 

People used to think she flew in a 
straight line to the hive, and so they called 
the shortest distance from one place to 
another a " bee line/' 

But she does not fly in a straight line, 
— far from it. 

Whoever has " made a bee line for 
home " — that is, a true bee line — must 
have followed a very indirect course indeed. 

When Miss Apis has filled her honey- 
sac, and is ready to go home, she first 
mounts up into the air, not straight up, 
but round and round in a spiral, and 

when high enough she starts toward 
85 



86 The Bee People. 

home — but not in a straight line. She 
makes a long curve to the right, and then 
to the left, to the right again, then to the 
left, and so on. 

I do not know why she does this, but 
no doubt there is a good reason for it. 
Perhaps it makes it harder for bee-eating 
birds to catch her. It certainly is not easy 
to follow her flight with the eye, until one 
has practised enough to become accustomed 
to it. 

When Miss Apis reaches home, she finds 
a large family. 

There are her sisters, to begin with. She 
generally has many thousands of sisters 
just like herself, and they are all named 
Apis Mellifica. 

This might be confusing if they called 
each other by name ; that is, by the name 
we have given them. But, of course, they 
do not do that. 

I do not know what they call each other, 
but I do know that they are as much 



Miss Apis and Her Sisters. Sy 

alike as one pea is like another. They all 
have twelve thousand six hundred small 
eyes and three large ones, a folding tongue, 
a honey-sac, wings that lock together, 
extraordinary legs, and several other useful 
and curious things. 

Having watched Miss Apis going from 
flower to flower in the sunshine, you may 
think that this pleasant duty is all there 
is in her life. But oh, how mistaken you 
are! 

Wait until you see her at home ! There 
is as much work to be done in her house 
as in anybody's, and she does it too. She 
works very hard, and, in fact, with her 
sisters, does all the work. Nobody else 
in the family does any, and so she is called 
the worker bee. 

For you must know that she and her 
thousands of sisters, who are as like her 
as one pea is like another, are not the 
only members of the family. 





XI. 



THE BROTHERS. 




THERE are the drones, their brothers. 
These fine gentlemen never gather 
honey or pollen, nor do any work in the 
hive. 

In fact, they are scarcely able to feed 
themselves, and very much like to have 
their sisters feed them. 

They are hand^ 
and somewhat 
their little. 

They have 

enormous com pound T eyes that meet on 
top and crowd the other three eyes down 
in front, between them. They have more 
than twice as many facets in their eyes 
as the workers. Their antennae are long 




some fellows, 
larger than 

worker sisters. 

nd heads, with 



The Brothers. 89 

and very sensitive. They have large bodies 
covered with a coat of soft brown down, 
very pretty to look at, and their wings 
are large. 

That they are so helpless, I am glad to 
say, is not their fault. Mr. Apis Mellifica 
has no honey-sac, so he could hardly be 
expected to go out and try to bring home 
honey. He could not gtt it even if he had a 
honey-sac in which to store it, because his 
tongue is so short and so weak. He can 
eat honey from the honey-comb in the hive, 
or from any easily obtained supply, but 
that is the best he can do. 

So Mr. Drone Apis Mellifica leaves the 
sweet occupation of gathering nectar to 
his sister, Miss Worker Apis Mellifica. 

As for pollen, the drone has no baskets in 
which to carry it, so there is an end to that. 

And as for working in the hive, he is 
no better off for tools to work with than 
he is for a honey-sac, a serviceable tongue, 
and pollen baskets, 




90 The Bee People. 

In fact, there is nothing for him to do 
but to stay at home and be taken care of 
like a gentleman of leisure. 

This he does to perfection. He stands 
about with his hands in his pockets, so 

to speak, and lets 
- his little brown sis- 

His little brown sister feeds him. f ers f ee( J fc^ w hich 

they do by allowing him to put his tongue 
into their mouths. On warm, sunny days, 
he flies out to see the world and to try his 
fortune. 

Occasionally a drone meets the young 
queen of another hive, also out to see the 
world. When this happens they mate, but 
she stays with him only a short time, and 
then goes back to her own hive and leaves 
him. 

The poor fellow has no sting at all, so he 
cannot defend himself, or avenge an insult. 
We may pick him up, if we can catch him, 
with no fear of being stung, and may say 
anything to him or about him that we please. 



The Brothers. 91 

Basketless, stingless, with no honey- 
sac, and no serviceable nectar-gathering 
tongue, he is almost as helpless as a Chinese 
lady. 

Only she is purposely made helpless, and 
he is born so. 

A Chinese girl baby has as good feet as 
any baby, and they would grow as large as 
other people's if it were not the fashion 
for the mothers to squeeze the poor little 
tootsie-wootsies into small ugly shoes that 
hurt the babies terribly and make them as 
cross as crabs. It serves their mothers right, 
too, when they are cross. Think of crippling 
them all their lives so they can neither work 
nor do anything useful. 

In China the people consider it a disgrace 
to work, and the rich people cripple their girl 
babies to show that it is not necessary for 
them to work. 

It is not considered a disgrace to work in 
the hive, however, nor in any other really 
civilized community. 



9 2 



The Bee People. 



In fact, all the bees in the hive work 
very hard, excepting the drones, and they 
generally form a very small proportion of 
the whole number. 

The drone is an idler because he is so 
made that it is impossible for him to work. 

But he is happy, and flies about in the 
sun, taking whatever good comes to him 
without finding fault. 

His sisters are glad to work for him, 
and he is glad to have them do so. 





XII. 

THE QUEEN. 

ONE would expect to find a mother 
in so large and flourishing -a family, 
and you will not be surprised to hear that 
there is one. 

Queen Apis Mellifica is the mother of 
the hive, and is by far the most important 
member of the community, as I suppose 
a queen always is — or should be, if she 
is a true queen. 

Queen Apis is a true queen, as she shows 
by working harder than any other bee in 
the hive. Of course her work is different 
from that of the workers, else why should 
she be a queen ? She does not carry 
nectar and pollen, and make honey-comb, 
and care for the young bees, but she does 

93 



94 



The Bee People. 



something just as difficult and just as 
important. 

Like the drone, she has no honey- 
sac and no pollen baskets, though both 
queen and drone have plenty of brushes 
on their legs to keep themselves clean. 
Her wings are small, and she has a very 
short tongue. Her head is small in pro- 






portionVo nen Doa^y, as are 
also her eyes, which have fewer facets)? 
than the workers' eyes, and she has short 
antennas. 

In this picture of the heads of the queen, 
the drone, and the worker, you can readily 
tell which is which. 

You see the queen expects to be taken 
care of all her days, and so does not need 
to be as well provided with sense organs 
as the workers. 



The Queen. 95 

Like the workers, and unlike the drones, she 
has a sting, but she very seldom uses it. In 
fact, you can handle her with as little fear of 
being stung as you can handle a drone. 

The queen's sting is very, very precious, 
and she will not run the risk of losing 
it by stinging you. 

There is only one queen in a hive, and 
she very seldom flies abroad. There is 
too much to be done at home, for we 
must not forget that she is really the mother 
of the whole colony. The workers are 
her daughters, and the drones her sons. 
We call her a queen, but she is queen only 
in the sense that every true mother is a 
queen in her home. 

If the people who named her long ago had 
known as much about bees as we know to- 
day, they doubtless would have called her 
the mother-bee instead of the queen-bee. 

The chief occupation of the queen-bee 
is to lay eggs. She lays the eggs for the 
whole colony. 



96 The Bee People. 

Sometimes she lays as many as three 
thousand in one day. 

She does not keep this up day after day 
the year round; even a queen-bee could 
not be expected to do that. But to lay 
three thousand eggs a day for a short time 
will furnish plenty of work for those 
who have to take care of the eggs and 
the young bees, and will keep the queen 
busy. Sometimes a hundred thousand 
eggs are laid in one season, which means 
a great deal of work for both tjueen and 
workers. 

The ancients believed that bees gathered 
their young off the leaves of trees, or 
from the flowers of honeywort, the reed, 
or the olive. There was another super- 
stition, that bees came forth from the de- 
cayed bodies of animals, and Virgil, who 
wrote much better Latin than most people 
can write English, soberly gives us a recipe 
for producing bees from the dead bodies 
of cattle! 



The Qiieen. 97 

Virgil's power to write well was greater 
than his knowledge of Natural History, 
which is not surprising, since there were 
no microscopes in those days. 

To-day we know that if there are to be 
young bees, eggs must first be laid. 

Bees cannot be picked from trees or 
flowers, or any other object, and carried 
home. 

The queen-bee has to lay an egg for 
every one of the many bees that fill a hive. 

And now you can understand why Queen 
Apis is so exceedingly particular about using 
her sting ; for her sting is her ovipositor as 
well. 

Ovipositor means egg -placer, for ovi 
comes from a Latin word, meaning egg, 
and positor from another Latin word, 
meaning "to place." It is with this that 
she places the eggs just where she wants 
them to be. 

The ovipositor is made very much like 

the sting of the worker ; and as the eggs 

7 



98 The Bee People. 

ripen they pass through fhe long tube of 
the ovipositor, which guides them to the 
right place in the comb'. 

If the queen were to lose her sting, she 
would no longer be able to lay the eggs, 
and so the colony would soon die out. 

For worker-bees live only a few months 
at the best, and sometimes only a few 
weeks, so the queen, who lives four or five 
years, and sometimes even longer, has to 
keep on laying eggs in order to keep her 
large household supplied with new mem- 
bers as the old die off. 

It is no wonder, therefore, that she will 
not sting. 

The queen takes no care of the eggs, nor 
of the young bees. She leaves all that to 
her daughters, the workers. She does not 
even feed herself much of the time. 

But the workers are glad to take care 
of her. They prepare a special food for 
her, better than the food the other grown- 
up bees get, which is quite proper, as such 



The Qiieen. 99 

a bee could not be expected to eat ordinary 
food. 

Queen Apis has tasters, as did the old 
kings of France and England. Only the 
king's taster ate a little of the king's dish 
in his Majesty's presence, that he might be 
sure nobody had poisoned it, for they were 
fond of poisoning kings in those days. 

But Queen Apis is not afraid of poison. 
She knows her children love her too well 
for that, and that they taste her food out 
of love to her. In fact, they do more than 
taste it, they swallow and digest the bee- 
bread and honey, and in their bodies it 
is made into a very nutritious food with 
which they feed their queen. 

When she is hungry she goes to a worker 
bee, inserts her short tongue into its mouth, 
and takes what she wants, though sometimes 
she eats honey from the combs as well. 

Occasionally bees feed one another on 
honey in this way, and they also feed the 
drones. 



ioo The Bee People. 

If you put a bee just caught and with 
her sac full of honey on a window-pane 
with a bee from the same hive that has 
had nothing to eat for an hour or two, 
you will see a pretty sight. The hungry 
bee will go to her newly arrived companion, 
and as soon as they have crossed antennae 

^^ss^fcMB^-^*^^^ anc ^ discovered they 
^^^^p^l^^lp^are friends, the hun- 
gry sister will present her tongue. Then 
the other will open her jaws and doubt- 
less proceed to force up the honey from 
the honey-sac to her mouth for the benefit 
of her hungry sister. 

The one that takes the sv/eets usually 
raises her wings slightly as though express- 
ing her pleasure and satisfaction at thus 
unexpectedly obtaining a meal. 

There is good reason for feeding the 
queen with " royal jelly," as her food is called. 

The formation of eggs uses up a good 
deal of food material as well as a good 
deal of strength. 



The Qiieen. 



101 



If Queen Apis's strength were used up 
in digesting food, for it takes a good deal 
of strength to digest food properly, how 
do you suppose she could lay all those 
eggs? 

She could not possibly do it. The 
workers seem to know this, and so they 
save her strength in every possible way. 

They give her an abundance of the best 
of food, and they do all the work, not even 
asking her to take any care of the little bee- 
babies when they are hatched. 




SINCE honey-bees eat almost nothing 
but pollen and honey, a good store 
of these has to be laid up for winter use, 
as well as to feed all the young bees and 
the drones. 

Gathering honey and pollen, however, is 
but a small part of our little worker's business. 

If I tell you there is something very won- 
derful about Miss Apis that you have not 
yet heard, you will not be surprised. 

Probably by this time you would be more 
surprised if you failed to hear something 
wonderful about her. 

This that I am about to tell is quite as 
wonderful as her eyes, or her honey-sac, 
or her wings, or anything else. 



I02 



The Work in the Hive. 103 

She has pockets I 

You do not think pockets are so very 
wonderful ? 

Well, neither do I, just ordinary common- 
place, every-day pockets for carrying- pencils 
and such things ; but what about wax 
pockets ? Not pockets made of wax, you 
understand, but pockets filled with wax. 

Miss Apis has a head. 

That is no news, I am aware, as most 
creatures have heads. But connected with 
her head by a short neck, as you know, 
she has a chest, which if you want to 
be scientific you must call a thorax. To 
this her legs and wings are fastened, and 
behind her thorax, and attached to it by 
a very slender waist, is the rest of her 
body, or as we must call it, her abdomen. 

This abdomen is jointed ; it is made of 
rings connected to each other by a skin- 
like membrane, and the rings fit close to- 
gether under each other, or are drawn apart 
from each other to lengthen her abdomen. 




104 The Bee People. 

There are six of these rings, and under- 
neath four of them, on the under-side of 
•her abdomen, are shallow hol- 
lows, two on each ring, and 
these eight hollows are the wax 
pockets. 
The queen and the drones have 
Vax no wax pockets; only the 
whttaTlw! workers have them. 

inginthem - If you think Miss Apis 

gathers the wax somewhere and puts it 
into these pockets, you are as much mis- 
taken as if you thought two and two 
were nine. She does not gather it; she 
makes it. 

By this time you will understand she is 
rather peculiar. 

When you undertake to store up honey, 
you must have something to put it in. 
You cannot put it on the floor or in a 
corner where everybody that went near it 
would stick fast, and where it would run 
out and be wasted. 



The Work in the Hive. 105 

You must have bottles, or cans, or jars, 
or something of that kind to put it in. 

If you are a bee you cannot go to the 
store and buy these things ; you have to 
make them. You have no glass to make 
them of, and would not know how if you 
had. So you gorge yourself with honey, 
eat all you possibly can, then go hang 
yourself up in the top of the hive and 
wait. 

That is what the bees at the head of 
this chapter are doing. 

And now you see how very important 
their hook-like toes are, for all they have 
to do is to turn up their toes and hook 
them fast to the hive or to the foot of 
another bee. 

This time, you understand, the honey 
has actually been eaten, not stored away 
to be drawn back into the mouth again 
and deposited in the hive. It has been 
eaten, and the bee now keeps still while 
this heavy meal digests. 



106 The Bee People. 

You and I, who have studied Physiology 
a little, know that when people are able 
to digest much sugar they become fat. The 
sugar is someway turned into fat. 

Eating a great deal of sugar is not 
the same thing as digesting a great deal, 
please remember that. When people eat 
a great deal of sugar, as, for instance, candy 
and other sweetmeats, at all hours of the 
day, it generally does not digest; it does 
something very different, and ultimately 
makes them sick. But bees are so happily 
constituted that they can digest all they eat. 

When a bee eats so much honey that 
she can do nothing but sleep, as it were, 
until she gets over the effects, we might 
be tempted to call her a glutton. But 
we must not judge bees by ourselves. In 
some respects they are wiser than we. 
When a bee gorges herself with honey, 
she knows what she is doing. She knows 
she will not suffer from indigestion, for 
one thing, and she knows she will not 



The Work in the Hive. 



107 



become fat and clumsy for another. Of 
course the sweet meal must be disposed of 
in some way ; and, in fact, there is formed 
from it a substance something like fat, only 
different. 

This substance is wax, and it finds its 
way in liquid form through pores in the 
bee's body into the eight depressions on 
the under-side of the abdomen, where it 
hardens. We might say she sweats out 
the wax into her pockets. 

When Miss Apis wants wax, then, she 
eats a hearty meal of honey and suspends 
herself in the hive for a nap while it digests. 
When she wakes up, her eight pockets are 
full of wax. It was Huber who first told 
us that wax is made from honey eaten by 
the bees. 

I 





XIV. 



HONEY-COMB. 

\ A J AX makes first-rate jars for storing 

* * honey. It is tight and firm, and 
prevents air and water from getting in. 
It is strong enough not to be injured by 
the weight of the bees walking over it. 

You may be sure Miss Apis knows aH this. 

She is not surprised to find her pockets 
full of wax, and she knows just what to 
do with it. 

Her hind legs are each 
provided with a pair 
nippers for pulling the 
wax scales out of the pockets. You can_ 
best see them by looking at the inside of 
the leg. At the end of joint 4 at A are 
strong teeth that shut down on the hard 
plate at X on joint 5- 

108 




Honey -Comb- 109 

When she has pulled out the scales, she 
moistens them in her mouth with saliva, 
for they are too brittle at first to be useful. 
When they are thoroughly moistened and 
softened, she pulls them out into white 
bands. 

Now she is all ready to make honey-cups. 

First, in company with a number of her 
sisters, she sticks a little wax along one 
side of the hive near the top, then the 
six-sided cups or cells are begun. 

This sounds easy enough, but suppose 
you try to make a six-sided cell of moist 
bees' wax and see how you succeed ! 

Of course you have not the best tools 
in the world for such work, for good as 
fingers may be for cutting with a scissors, 
or driving nails, or picking up pins, they 
would be poor tools for making cells of 
bees' wax. 

Miss Apis is supplied with something 
better. You know about that. Those 
claws on her feet are admirable wax tools, 



no 



The Bee People. 



and so are her jaws, and even her tongue, 
which she uses in the finer work of the 
cell. 

The bees begin at the roof and build 
the comb downward. 

It is wonderful to think of the fairy 
structure growing there in the dark hive 
under the efforts of the industrious little 
bees. 

They make six-sided cells lying close 
together, so as not to waste either room 
jDr wax. 

No other shape would so 
well fill the space. 
They have found this out ; 
and as they want to put as 
many cells into as small a 
space as possible, the wise 
workers pat, and pull, and press 
the wax into hexagonal cups or jars. 

Although many bees work together, and 
in the dark too, they keep watch over each 
other's movements in some way, and build 




Honey -Comb- in 

the cells in rows, one row below the other, 
until they have a wall or sheet of cells 
reaching nearly to the bottom of the hive. 

This sheet of cells we call a comb. 

If you expect to find all the cells in a 
comb of exactly the same size and shape, 
you will be disappointed. 

Miss Apis fills the space at her disposal 
with wonderfully regular six-sided cells, far 
better ones than you or I could make ; but 
the rows are not always perfectly straight, 
and the cells are not always perfectly uni- 
form in size, as they would be if made 
by machinery. 

Miss Apis is not a machine, and for my 
part I like her work better than if it were 
perfectly regular. 

As the comb hangs in the hive, the cells 
of course do not stand up with their open 
mouths at the top as we set a cup on the 
table, but they lie" on their sides, which 
seems rather odd when we come to think 
of it. 



112 



The Bee People 



Suppose you were to lay your fruit jars 
on their sides on the table in a row, and 
then pile another row above them, and 
so on. 

You would have them nicely packed 
away, but how could you fill them with- 
out having the contents run out as fast 

as put in ? 



Miss Apis is able 
to overcome even 
that difficulty. She 
builds a double row 
of cells placed back to back, and opening 
of course in opposite directions. 

The cells are not quite parallel with the 
floor of the hive, but their mouths are 
tipped up just a little, and they are slightly 
curved, as if Miss Apis were afraid the 
honey might run out if she laid them 
down too flat. 

If you look into an empty cell of honey- 
comb, you will see that the cells in a sheet 
of comb are not exactly opposite to each 





Honey -Comb. 113 

other, but that the bottom of a cell on 
the right side of the comb overlaps the 
edges of three or four cells i^T^v'TN 011 
the left side. That is, the 
cells are placed so that the' 
bottom of one rests where three others 
on the opposite side come together, and 
sometimes overlaps a fourth. 

You can easily see the edges of the op- 
posite cells through the wax that forms 
the bottom of a cell, and you can under- 
stand that placing the cells this way makes 
the comb much stronger. 

Now the comb is made and ready to 
be filled with honey. 

Probably young bees that have not yet 
gone out of the hive in search of nectar, 
build the cells. 

The rovers bring in nectar, and standing 
over the cells press it up from their honey- 
sacs. A great many loads are necessary 
to fill one cell, as each bee carries less 
than a drop at a time. 



ii4 The Bee People. 

All day long in and out fly the bees, 
each one leaving her little load of honey 
to help to fill the honey-comb cells. 

But why does not the honey run out 
as fast as it is put in? That question 
has not yet been answered. 

It is easier to ask than to answer, unless 
you know more about natural philosophy 
than I think you do. 

To begin with, honey is sticky. You 
know that as well as 1 do. And it will 
stick to honey cups as well as to . anything 
else. When the bee puts a little drop in 
the bottom of a cup it tends to stick fast. 
A cellful of honey, however, is not sticky 
enough to keep from running out, as we 
know when we take off the cover to a 
honey-comb cell. To help the honey to stay 
in, the cells, as we know, are tilted up a little. 
The cells are small, and the liquid honey 
tends to remain in a small cell, just on that 
account, — which is a matter for Physics 
to explain. Then, when Miss Apis has her 



Honey -Comb. 115 

cell nearly full, she begins to put a cover 
over it. She begins at the bottom of the 
cell to put on this "cap," as it is called, 
and by the time she has finished the cap, 
the cell is as full of honey as she can get 
it, but there is a little air left in, which 
acts as a cushion, and keeps the honey 
from running against the cap. 

So there is her honey-cup, filled and 
sealed. 

Miss Apis fills her honey cell rather 
slowly, and leaves it uncapped for a few 
days until the extra water evaporates and 
the honey is " ripened." 

You know very well that if you have 
molasses in an open dish, it becomes thicker 
as time goes on ; that is because it loses 
its water by evaporation, and that is exactly 
what happens when honey is left uncapped 
for a while. It gets thicker and keeps 
better. 

Miss Apis does not fill all of her fine 
little wax preserve jars with honey. If 



u6 



The Bee People. 



she did, what would become of the bee- 
bread ? 

We do not often see bee-bread in these 
days, because we have given Miss Apis 
little wooden frames for her honey-comb, 
and when we take these from the hive, only 
those containing pure honey are sent to 
market. If there is bee-bread in any of 
the frames, they are returned to the hive. 

When Miss Apis comes home with her 
pollen baskets full, she scrapes out her load 
into a wax jar, or cell, as I suppose we ought 
to call it. 

You remember the little crowbar she has 
on her middle leg for prying the sticky 
mass out JUjof her pollen 
basket. \ mm 




Honey -Comb. 



117 



When the pollen, or bee-bread, as it 
generally is called after Miss Apis has 
gathered it and mixed it with honey, has 
been pushed into the cell, it is patted down 
and perhaps a little more honey added to 
it. When the cell is full, it is capped over 
like the cells that contain honey. 

Sometimes a whole comb will be filled 
with bee-bread, and sometimes a comb will 
contain part bee-bread and part honey. 

Miss Apis is fond of bee-bread, but we 
are not We gladly take away her honey, 
but we do not care to rob her of her bee- 
bread. It has a curious taste 
whiich I should like to describe to you, 
l^but 1 can only say it tastes like 
bee-bread, and like nothing else in 
|\the world that 
$' \ know of. 





n8 The Bee People. 

Miss Apis has a habit of storing the 
honey in the top of the hive, and that is 
where, in our new-fashioned hives, we put 
the little wooden frames we want her to 
fill. When she has filled them, all we 
have to do is to open the top of the hive 
and lift them out; that is, unless she has 
glued them fast. 

Miss Apis is very particular about hav- 
ing everything firm and tight in her hive. 
She does not want honey-combs tumbling 
about her ears, breaking and spilling what 
is in them, so whenever there is half 
an excuse to do so she glues them fast. 
She stops up all the holes in her hive, 
too, with glue ; that is, if there are any 
holes. 

No doubt this glue is very useful when 
she builds in hollow trees, or when her hive 
is old and rickety. 

But people generally take care of the 
hives, and build them tight or else stop 
up the holes. 



Honey -Comb. ll 9 

Miss Apis's glue is a perfect nuisance 
to the bee-keeper. She seems to think 
she must daub everything over with it, 
whether necessary or not, and she fastens 
the frames so tightly, if the bee-keeper is 
not on the watch, that it is hard work to 
get them out of the hive. 

The only way is to watch and take out 
the frames before she has time to glue them 

fast. 

You wonder where she gets her glue? 
Why, she just finds it. She sometimes 
scrapes it off from the sticky buds of the 
poplar or cherry tree, or from other plants. 
Huber watched his bees scrape bee-glue 
from wild poplar buds. Miss Apis brings 
the glue home in her pollen baskets. It 
is brown and shiny like resin, and spoils 
the looks of whatever it touches. But 
Miss Apis does not seem to care much 
for mere looks. 





HONEY AND HONEY-DEW. 



MISS APIS is probably as proud of her 
hive when she gets it stored full of 
honey and bee-bread, as your mother is 
of her pantry when she gets the jelly and 
preserves done in the fall. 

At least, I should think she would be. 

It is a very cunning art to take nectar 
from the flowers, and in one's honey-sac 
change it into delicious honey. 

It is not every creature that can do that. 
In fact, I know of but one or two besides 
Miss Apis and her near relatives that can. 

Although the nectar is changed to honey, 
it still retains its own flavor, so that the 
bee-keepers can often tell by the taste what 
kind of flowers honey is made from. 



I20 



Honey and Honey- Dew. 121 

Miss Apis is very particular about the 
quality of her honey, and does not like to 
mix up different kinds. If she starts out 
to gather white clover honey, she will visit 
the clover fields all day, and for many days, 
and pass by other flowers, rather than mix 
their nectar with the clover nectar. 

White clover honey is delicate and deli- 
cious, and bees are very fond of visiting 
the white clover heads. Honey-bees do 
not gather much honey from the red clover, 
because the little flower tubes are too long 
for their tongues, and generally they cannot 
reach the nectar. 

Bumble-bees love the red clover, but 
you shall hear a story about that later. 

Sweet clover yields good honey, and where 
it grows the bees gather a great deal from it. 

The fragrant flowers of the basswood 
are great favorites with the bees, and when 
a basswood tree is in bloom, it sometimes 
sounds like an enormous bee-hive, there 
are so many bees after its honey. 



122 



The Bee People, 



Most people who live in the north are 
familiar with the dark-colored buckwheat 
honey, and those who live far south 
know the clear delicate 
Ja^ orange-blossom honey. 
Sometimes bees 
gather honey from 
poisonous plants, 
but that does not 
happen very 
often in this 
country. When 
you read Xeno- 
pnonV "Anabasis," 
you will learn how 
Xenophon's whole army 
were poisoned by eating 
some honey they found while 
m /jrarcning through Asia.^l^gp^ 7 The Re- 
treat of the Ten Thous si and is a 
very interesting story, ^ and I hope 

you will hurry and get old enough to read 
the " Anabasis." 





Honey and Honey- Dew. 123 

Miss Apis sometimes gathers other sweets 
than flower-juice. I am sorry to say she 
will even steal the honey from other bees 
if she can get it. 

Sometimes she takes cider, but that 
makes very poor honey indeed. When 
ripe fruits split open, or the wasps bite 
holes in them, Miss Apis may sometimes 
be seen taking her share of the fruit juice. 

It is not often, however, that Miss Apis 
preserves fruit juice; she leaves that for 
us to do. 

She does collect honey-dew, though, and 
sometimes will fill her hive full of honey 
made from it. 

Probably you do not know what honey- 
dew is ; it is not everybody that does know, 
but I do, and I am going to tell. 

You all have heard of the aphides, the 
ants 7 cows ? 

You know they are tiny little insects 
with two horns on their backs. They give 
out a sweet liquid of which the ants are 



124 



The Bee People. 



very fond. We are told that some ants 
take care of the aphides, protect them and 
treat them as if they were indeed little 
insect cows. 

SBjl|£ At certain seasons of the 
234^ year the aphides are very abun- 
dant. We sometimes call them 
plant-lice, and 1 am sure you 
have all seen them on rose 
bushes, and lilies, and 
^ other garden plants. 
Sometimes they are green, 
sometimes brown, sometimes 
Aphides enlarged, {hey have wings, sometimes 
not. They are very curious little creatures, 
and sometime you must learn more about 
them. 

An aphis puts her bill into the skin of a 
leaf, and there she stays and sucks out its 
juice, which you can imagine is not very 
good for the leaf. 

Some of the juice which the aphides eat 
is changed into the sweet liquid the ants 




Honey and Honey- Dew. 125 

are so fond of; and if there are no ants 
to eat it, the aphides are obliged to get rid 
of it, and they squirt it out in the air. 

I have stood under a tulip -tree and 
watched a perfect shower of this honey- 
dew come raining down from the countless 
aphides on the leaves. The aphides stay 
on the under-side of the leaves and the 
honey-dew falls on the upper side of the 
leaves below them. Sometimes the leaves 
of a tree or a bush will shine as if they 
had been varnished, because of the honey- 
dew that covers them. Such leaves are 
sticky to the touch, too, and, in fact, be- 
come very disagreeable, as dust settles on 
the sticky surface. 

I once saw all the plants in the Carolina 
Mountains covered with this honey-dew. 
The season had been dry, which is what 
the aphides like, and they were over every- 
thing. 

The little mountain children used to pick 
these sweet leaves and lick off the honey- 



126 The Bee People. 

dew. You see, they have no candy in 
the mountains, and the children took the 
honey-dew without waiting for the bees 
to make it into honey. 

But bees and children are not the only 
lovers of honey-dew- 

I have often watched the squirrels lick 
it from the leaves. 

They take a leaf between their paws and 
hold it to their mouths, while their little 
tongues lick the leaf all over. It is great 
fun to watch the squirrels do this, and I 
hope you will see it yourself some day. 
I do not know whether squirrels like 
candy, but 1 am perfectly sure they like 
honey-dew. 

Honey-dew used to be a great mystery 
to people, and very funny notions were 
held regarding it. 

Pliny, an old Latin naturalist, supposed 
it was "the perspiration of the sky, the 
saliva of the stars, or the moisture deposited 
by the atmosphere while purging itself, 



Honey and Honey- Dew. 127 



corrupted by its admixture with the mists 
of earth." 

We know that it is not the perspiration 
of the sky, nor the saliva of the stars, but 
just the work of the little aphides. 

There are many people still living who 
think the honey-dew goes up as a sort 
of mist from the earth, and falls again as 
a sweet dew on the leaves. 

Bees like the honey-dew very much, 
and I have eaten honey made from it, but 
I must confess I did not like it. 

Some honey-dew is said to make very 
good honey, but I prefer to have the bees 
bring my honey from the flowers. 






CRADLE-CELLS. 

SOME of Miss Apis's wax cells 
the purpose of preserve-jars, as we 
have seen. Indeed, they all do, when we 
come to think of it. 

They do not all preserve honey and bee- 
bread, however. 

You have not forgotten that the queen- 
bee sometimes lays as many as three 
thousand eggs a day. Well, each little 
egg must have a cell of comb all to itself. 

You can imagine that the wax-makers and 
cell-builders do not have a chance to grow 
lazy in the busy season of egg-laying; for 
if the queen does not lay three thousand 

eggs every day, she may upon some days, 

128 



Cradle- Cells. 129 

and she always lays at least enough 
to satisfy any reasonable lover of hard 
work. 

The cradle-cells of the drones are the 
same as the honey-cells, but the worker- 
cells are about one-fifth smaller. 

You see, the workers are smaller than 
the drones, and so can lie in smaller cradles. 

The cradle-cell of the queen is 
not shaped like the other cells, 
but somewhat like a thimble. 
It opens at the bottom, and is a 1 
great deal larger. 

The queen goes about and lays an egg 
in each cell. She first puts in her head 
and examines the cell with her antennae, 
as if to make sure it is all right. 

This done, she deposits an egg in the 
bottom of the cell. She lays two kinds 
of eggs, one kind being what we call fer- 
tilized, the other kind unfertilized. The 
fertilized eggs always hatch into workers 
or queens, the unfertilized always hatch 




130 The Bee People. 

into drones. The queen is able to fertilize 
the eggs, or not, as she pleases. 

As soon as an tgg is laid, the queen pays 
no further attention to it. It is now the 
turn of- the nurse-bees. The nurse-bees 
are the younger ones that have not yet 
gone out of the hive. 

For about three days after the tgg is laid, 
you could see no change in it. 

Perhaps you think it needs no attention, 
but a hen would not think so. She knows 
that eggs have to be kept warm in order 
to hatch, and so she sits on her own eggs 
with her feathers tucked down warm all 
about them. Miss Apis, too, understands 
that eggs need to be kept warm. She has 
no feathers, but she has a warm little fuzzy 
body, and when the eggs are laid, she and 
her sisters cluster over the comb to keep 
them warm. 

The ancients neld a good many wrong 
ideas, and a good many right ones, about 
bees, and our Latin friend Pliny was not 



Cradle-Cells. 131 

altogether wrong when he said bees sat 
upon their eggs like hens. 

In about three days the eggs hatch, but 
not into pretty downy bees with gauzy 
wings. No, indeed ! If you were to see 
what hatches out of a bee's tgg you would 
not imagine that queer 1 
thing could ever make a bee. // 



It is a little white atom, _._.^ # 
with no legs and no wings/ff 



and looks like a maggot. jf~ 
Here is a picture of one very much 
enlarged. It may not look like a bee, 
but still it is a baby bee. 

If you do not like to call it a bee, you 
may call it a larva. For larva is the name 
we give to the first form of an insect after 
it leaves the tgg. 

This little larva is born hungry, and the 
kind nurse-bees, knowing that, feed it 
with plenty of — what shall I call it ? Bee- 
milk, perhaps. This bee-milk is manu- 
factured by the nurses in glands in their 



132 



The Bee People. 



heads ; it is very nutritious, and is the 
same as the royal jelly with which the 
queen is fed. They place the food in the 
cell with the larva, and watch to see that 
it always has enough. They feed it with 
honey and pollen as it grows older; and 
how it does eat! 

In a few days it has grown so large 
that it almost fills its cradle-cell. 

It would not do to let this ravenous 
infant grow entirely out of bounds, but 
I doubt if you could guess what the nurse- 
//bees do to prevent it. 
They simply stop 

feeding it 
That is certainly a 
\ sure way to check its 
■growth ; only most 
babies, if treated so, would make up their 
minds that life without dinner was not 
worth living, and would die right off. 

But bee-babies do not die ; they wait 
to see what will happen next. 




Cradle- Cells. 133 

It would take a long time for anybody 
but a bee to guess what happens next. 

It is rather a peculiar performance, but 
Miss Apis's performances are usually pe- 
culiar. 

She caps over the cell of the baby-bee. 

It would be difficult to imagine an easier 
way of disposing of a baby, — bottle it up 
like a jar of pickles or a cell of honey. 

It is not much trouble to take care of 
such babies. 

They only need to be kept warm. 
Meantime, the infant thus disposed of 
spins for itself a soft little silken night-cap. 

You see, it has nothing else to do. It 
cannot get anything to eat, and they do 
not give it so much as a rubber ring to 
bite on, as far as I know; so it amuses 
itself spinning a night-cap, or a soft little 
cocoon, about the upper part of its fat 
little bottled-up body. 

Some babies might cry under the circum- 
stances ; but I doubt if this baby could do 



134 



The Bee People. 



that even if it wanted to, for how could 
it cry with its mouth full of silk? 

The silk for its cocoon comes out of its 
mouth, strange to say, — or rather out of a 
little hole in its lip, — and I have no doubt 
it is great fun for it to draw out the fine 
thread and spin. 

Then it changes its shape. You see, it 
jl is really an infant 
W Miss Apis, so we can- 
not be surprised that 
it should perform in 
queer ways, even at that tender age. 

It changes from a larva into a pupa. 

If you do not know what a pupa is, it 
is time you did. 

It is the same as a chrysalis. If you 
do not know what a chrysalis is, look at 
the picture and you will see one in the 
cell. 

You see, it is not a larva, nor yet a perfect 
insect, but something halfway between the 
two. 




Cradle-Cells. 135 

When Baby Apis becomes a pupa, she 
does nothing more wonderful than butter- 
flies and many other insects do, — for they 
too become pupae on the way to being 
grown up, just as we become boys or 
girls on the way to being men or women. 

You may like to know that larva is a 
Latin word, and means ghost, or mask, for 
the larva is, in one sense, the ghost or 
mask of the perfect insect. 

But what do you think pupa means? 

It, too, is a Latin word, and means doll. 

The pupa of insects is generally inactive, 
and does not seem to be alive, though, 
of course, it is alive, and so it is called 
a doll, or image of the insect. 

Baby Apis remains a pupa for several 
days, then she makes up her mind that 
if they want to keep other babies in bottles, 
they may, but as for her, she has had enough 
of it, so she puts up her mouth and gnaws 
a hole the shape of a crescent in the cap 
they put over her, and probably peeps out 




136 The Bee People. 

to see the world, — rather a dark world in 
the hive, one would think. 

Then she puts out her head. 

Then out she comes, a lovely young bee, 
light-colored and downy, and with beauti- 
ful gauzy wings. 

The cap that is put over the young bee 
is very porous, so the air can 
get in. Baby Apis may be 
bottled up with safety, but 
she must not be deprived of air, for if 
she is she will die. 

The queen-bee is hatched from an egg 
exactly like that of the worker-bees. But 
this egg, as we know, lies in a large cell, 
and when it hatches, the nurse-bees fairly 
stuff the queen larva with food. 

The worker infants get very little bee- 
milk ; they have to eat honey and bee-bread, 
but the queen infant is fed almost entirely 
upon this precious food, this " royal jelly." 

It is because she eats so much of this 
that she develops into a queen. Some- 



Cradle- Cells. 137 

times the queen in a hive dies or gets lost. 
Then what do you suppose the workers 
do? Why, go to work and make a new 
queen, of course. 

It is a terrible thing for a hive to be 
without a queen, and the bees are very 
unhappy when it happens. But if they 
have eggs or very young larvae they need 
not despair. 

They enlarge a worker cell in which 
lies an egg or a very young larva, by tearing 
down the cells next to it. Then they feed 
the infant thus promoted to royalty upon 
queen's food, and, lo ! the little creature 
becomes a queen. 

Drones get much more royal jelly than 
workers, but no amount of feeding or 
starving will make them anything but 
drones. 

It takes all the eggs three days to hatch, 
but the queen larva attains its growth in 
five and a half days, while it takes the 
worker six, and the drone six and a half. 



i3 8 The Bee People, 

The queen spins her cocoon, changes 
into a pupa, and comes forth a perfect 
bee all in seven and a half days, while it 
takes the worker twelve days and the drone 
fourteen and a half to complete these 
changes. 

If you do a little sum in addition, you 
will find that it takes sixteen days for an 
egg to become a queen-bee, twenty-one 
days for it to become a worker, and 
twenty-four days for a drone egg to be- 
come a drone. 

As soon as the worker-bees hatch out, 
they go to work. 

You already know what they do. They 
take care of the queen, following her about 
and feeding her with royal jelly whenever 
she is hungry, which is very often. 

They seem to be very fond of their hive- 
mother; and you will always see a little 
cluster of bees about her, caressing her 
with their antennas, and paying her the 
greatest respect. 



Cradle-Cells. 139 

The workers also take care of the eggs and 
the young bees, but do not generally lay any 
eggs themselves; only the queen does that. 

They make wax, build comb, and keep 
the hive clean, carrying out dead bees, or 
anything that does not belong in it. 

No doubt they watch at the door, too. 
For bees keep sentinels always on guard 
to see that thieves and robbers do not 
come in and steal their honey. 

If you knock on a. hive, the sentinels 
will fly out to see what is the matter. 

In a few days the young bees leave the 
home work to the newly hatched, and go 
forth to gather honey, and pollen, and 
bee-glue. 

You ought to know that bee-glue is 
called propolis, — a word that means " before 
the city," — and it is so named, because 
the bees use it to build fortifications in 
time of war. 

Certain moths attack bee-hives by crawl- 
ing in and laying their eggs in the corners. 




When the eggs hatch, the little 

caterpillar-like larvae that come 

out of them eat the comb and 

spoil the honey. To keep them 

out, the bees sometimes build 

walls of propolis just inside the 

live door, making the entrance 

so narrow that only one bee can 

pass at a time. In this way the 

Sentinels are better able to keep 

J out the intruders. 

Bees have been known to use 

propolis in strange ways. You know they 

chink up all the holes with it and glue the 

frames fast. Once, so the story goes, they 

glued a snail to the bottom of the hive. His 

snailship had crawled into the hive and 

the bees fastened his shell tightly to the 

floor. So, for going where he was not 
140 




Cradle-Cells- 141 

wanted, he found his house converted into 
his sepulchre. 

Another story is of a mouse that went 
into a bee-hive. The bees stung - him to 
death, but he was so large they could 
not remove him, so what did they do but 
cover him all over with propolis. Safe 
under the resinous bee-glue, his body could 
do no harm. 

Bees breathe as well as other creatures; 
they take in pure air and give out im- 
pure. They do not do this by means of 
lungs, as we do, but through little holes 
in their sides. They cannot live without 
fresh air, and you can well imagine that a 
house as crowded as theirs needs careful 
ventilation. 

They cannot lower the windows, because 
they have none, and they would not dare 
open any if they had them, for all sorts 
of creatures would come flying, and creep- 
ing, and running, and stealing in to get 
their precious honey. 



142 The Bee People. 

The only openings to the hives, as we 
know, are the little holes at the bottom 
where the bees go in and out. How, then, 
do they gtt fresh air ? 

You will not be surprised to learn that 
Miss Apis has solved this problem in a 
very ingenious manner. 

The only possible way of ventilating a 
hive through the little holes at the bottom is 
by fanning or pumping the air in and out. 

The bees fan a current of air through 
the hive, by standing near the entrance 
holes and buzzing with their wings. 

The buzzing sound is made by the rapid 
motion of the wings, and even one bee 
can cause quite a little breeze. When a 
number of them stand together just inside, 
and sometimes also just outside the hive, 
and fan, they produce currents of air strong 
enough to keep the crowded hive perfectly 
ventilated. 

Bees are more careful to have plenty 
of fresh air than are people. Huber dis- 



Cradle-Cells. 



i43 



covered that the air in the hive is nearly 
as pure as the air out of doors, and we 
should have reason to feel proud if our 
public buildings were as well ventilated 
as are the bee-hives. 




XVII. 




THE FAMILY EXODUS. 

ONE cannot go on adding several thou- 
sand members a week to one's family 
without sooner or later being obliged to 
enlarge the house — or move out. The 
Apis people move out. 

As soon as a young queen comes out of 
her cell, the old queen packs up, so to 
speak, and prepares to depart. 

She does not carry as much luggage as 
the Queen of England carries when she 
goes from Buckingham Palace to the Isle 
Wight. 
She merely gathers up her 
thousands of eyes, her 
yx shortish, but still valu- 

c^^able tongue, her bas- 
144 




The Family Exodus. 145 

ketless legs, and other personal possessions 
and starts off, taking with her most of the 
old bees in the hive, and leaving behind the 
young queen with the young bees and the 
honey-comb, and the brood comb full of 
eggs and larvae and pupae. 

She is very generous to the young queen, 
who of course is her own daughter, and 
leaves all the furniture and silver spoons 
and everything of that sort behind. 

Away she goes, with her faithful followers 
surrounding her in a dense swarm. 

The whole swarm goes careering through 
the air like a small cyclone, and I for one 
should not like to stand in its path. 

Some say the bees send out scouts to 
find a good place before the swarm starts, 
either a hollow tree or some other con- 
venient shelter, or else they go into a nice 
new hive if somebody has been watching 
and has one ready. 

Into the new home they go, and to work 
they go ; and in a little while you would 



146 



The Bee People. 



never suspect the family had recently 
moved in, so busy and so thoroughly at 
home do they all appear. 

They build new combs, make new honey 
and bee-bread, and just as soon as the cells 
are ready the queen continues her egg- 
laying. 





THE NEW QUEEN. 



MEANTIME all is not fair weather in 
the old hive. 

The new queen, although just out of her 
cell, understands her business perfectly, and 
is quite capable of going about it, but there 
are complications. Hers was not the only 
queen cell in that hive. 

There were others, And now, just as 
she has ascended the throne with the old 
queen peaceably out of the way, the suc- 
cession being accomplished without oppo- 
sition, lo and behold ! she hears a sound, — 
a sound that probably sends the blood to 
her heart, and causes her very toes to tingle. 

The sound she hears is not that of can- 
non afar, nor of drum-beats in the distance, 
147 



148 The Bee People, 

but it might as well be, for it is the piping 
of another young queen just about to come 
forth from its cell. 

The throne is not secure, after all, for 
there is another queen to dispute it. 

Of course there are ways of disposing of 
rivals to the throne, or there used to be, 
as any one who has read the early history 
of England knows. 

You may smother them in a tower, 
or poison them, or do something of that 
sort. 

Bees know how to smother bees that 
they hate, and they know how to poison 
them, but queen bees prefer to fight like 
queens for their thrones, and not get them 
by stealth or by striking in the dark; that 
is, if the rival is already out of her cradle. 

If a second queen hatches out df her cell 
before the first young queen finds her, there 
is a fight. 

The workers stand around and watch 
the conflict, but they never interfere, nor 




The New Queen. 149 

have I ever heard that they take sides and 
cheer their own candidate. 

The combatants seize each other with 
their jaws, and clasp each other with their 
feet, trying in every way to thrust the fatal 

f^ger into a vital ^^^^p^r 

What do I see ? part _ t | iat j s Come on, I am 
I must go over r ' 7 ready lor you ! 

and fight her! j nto fa t SQ f t 

parts between the rings of the abdomen, or 
where the neck joins the thorax, or the 
thorax the abdomen, — all these places being 
soft and allowing a dagger that is thrust 
into them to reach the inner vital parts. 

At length the fatal thrust is given : one 
of the queens is victor ; the other lies dead 
upon the field of battle. The workers carry 
out the dead body, but whether they mourn 
I cannot say. Certainly they do not have 
a grand funeral. I suppose it would not 
be exactly polite to the victorious queen 
to show too much sorrow for the van- 
quished one. 



150 The Bee People. 

Evidently our queen considers one such 
display of courage quite enough to establish 
her royal character, for she does not waste 
time fighting any more queens, but goes 
to the remaining queen cells, pulls off the 
caps where the bottled-up queen babies 
lie, and sticks her dagger right into their 
poor, soft, helpless little bodies. 

After she has stung all the baby queens 
she puts up her dagger, very likely deter- 
mined never to put anything so valuable to 
such a use again, for you remember her 
sting is also her ovipositor. 

She does not lose it when she stings a 
bee, because the parts where the sting en- 
ters are so soft that she can pull it out 
again; but you can imagine what a sad 
wound the barbs make when pulled out. 

Workers never sting a queen. If a 
strange queen is put into the hive, or flies in 
by mistake, and they do not want her, they 
gather about her so closely as to smother 
her to death, but they will not sting her. 



The New Qiieen. 151 

Only queens sting queens. 

If there should happen to be a good 
many bees still in the hive after a swarm 
leaves, the workers will not allow the 
queens to fight, but surround them and 
keep them apart until the older queen can 
be sent off with another swarm. 

If the hive is very much crowded, the 
bees may swarm out of it several times in 
one season. 

When all is serene within the hive, if the 
day is fair, the young queen takes an airing. 

She does not have an escort, but goes 
alone to view the beautiful world outside 
the hive. 

Huber was the first to discover that she 
flies up into the blue sky, where she meets 
a drone, who is her mate. He fills her 
pocket, which she carries on purpose, with 
pollen, not flower-pollen, but bee-pollen. 
This pollen lasts as long as she lives, and 
she uses it to fertilize the queen and worker 
eggs. 



152 The Bee People. 

So you see the drone is not so useless 
as he seems. Indeed, if it were not for 
him, there could be no workers and no 
queens. 

When she has taken her airing, Queen 
Apis goes home, and she never leaves the 
hive alone again. In fact, she never leaves 
it at all, except at the end, when she goes 
off with a swarm. 

As the season wears on, the workers take 
counsel together. Winter is coming, and 
what will become of them all if the supplies 
give out? 

There must be no more mouths to feed 
than necessary. The queen, of course, 
must be taken care of, and so must the 
workers; but there are the drones, per- 
haps hundreds or even thousands of them. 
They are no longer of any use : they bring 
in no honey; they do no work: they only 
endanger the lives of the whole family by 
eating up the winter food, so these little 
brown workers, on the plea of necessity, 



The New Oiieen. 153 

send the drones to the happy hunting 
grounds. 

Whether they are sorry about it or not 
I do not know; but, in any event, they 
fall upon their poor brothers and sting them 
to death, or else drive them from t%& ^ 
the hive, where they soon die from 
cold, exposure, and hunger. 

In late summer you will some- 
times see a disconsolate drone sit- 
ting on a flower, very likely grieving 
at the bitterness of his lot. 

Miss Apis, it seems to us very 
cruel of you to treat your broth- 
ers so. ^ 

But we must remember that bees are 
not people, and that what would be 
very wicked in us may be perfectly 
right in them. 

T-. 1 1_ 1 1 A disconsolate 

The worker-bees labor very drone. 
hard through the summer, so that some- 
times they wear themselves out in a few 
weeks, and die. 




154 The Bee People. 

Those hatched later in the season live 
through the winter, and are all ready to 
begin work as soon as the flowers come in 
the spring. 

Bees spend the winter clustered together 
in the hive, and are then so inactive that 
they seem to be scarcely alive. 

When bees go out from the hive for the 
first time to gather nectar, they are very 
smooth and fine-looking. 

But they, too, grow old. Their pretty 
velvety down wears off, and their wings 
become broken and ragged. I do not think 
they turn gray or get wrinkles in their 
faces, but they certainly do gtt to wear 
very shabby-looking wings. 




A Veteran. 




XIX. 

SOME ODD NOTIONS ABOUT BEES. 

PEOPLE used to think the 
queen-bee was a king, and 
ruled over all the bees in the hive. 
They thought a hive of bees was 
a little kingdom, with an army, and 
officers, and all sorts of workers. 
When you get old enough to read 
Shakespeare's " Henry V.," you will find in 
it a pretty story about the bees. He says, 
" They have a king, and officers of sorts; " 
and tells how some of the bees act as 
magistrates at home, while others go abroad 
to trade like merchants, and still others 
are armed soldiers. Some, he tells us, are 
masons, and do the building, others make 

the bread and honey, yet others are porters 
155 



Huckle- 
berries. 



156 The Bee People, 

and carry heavy burdens, while the judge 
hands the drones over to be executed. 

We know the truth about bees now, 
and yet we like to read these old stories. 

It used to be thought that bees carried 
little stones in their feet on windy days, 
so as not to be blown away. Probably 
the people saw their pollen balls and mis- 
took them for ballast. 

They used to think, too, that when the 
bees were belated and had to stay out 
all night, they would lie on their backs to 
keep their wings dry. 

A good many people, even yet, will not 
sell bees, because they think it is unlucky ; 
and when bees swarm, they sometimes 
use charms to keep them from going away. 
An old German bee-keeper, who lived in 
the United States, had such a charm. 

He told it to a little girl, but said it 
would bring bad luck if she were to repeat 
it to another girl. She might tell it to a 
man, or a boy, and he to another girl, and 



Odd Notions about Bees, 157 

so on, but a girl must never tell it to a 
girl, nor a boy to a boy. I will give you 
the charm in German, for those of 
you who understand German. 

When you see the bees swarm- 
ing, you must say to them, — 




Liebe Bienen, und liebe Bienen Mutter, 
Setzt euch auf Rasen und grimes Gras, 
Im Namen des Vaters, des Sohnes, und des 
Heiligen Geistes. Amen. 

You see, it is really a little prayer to 
the bees, and this is the English trans- 
lation : — 



Dear bees, and dear mother of the bees, 
Place yourselves upon the meadow and the green grass, 
In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy 
Ghost. Amen. 

A good many still think the bees must be 
told when there is a death in the family, 
or else they will go away. 

A member of the family goes at night 
and knocks on the hives, and says, " So- 




158 The Bee People. 

and-so is dead," and sometimes adds a little 
prayer to the bees not to leave. Some- 
times a piece of black ribbon or crape is 
tied on the hives. 

Whittier has written a beautiful poem 
called, "Telling the Bees," which I hope 
you will read. 

The ancients used to believe that the 
bee was given its marvellous habits by 
Jupiter, the king of the gods, because 
the bees fed him with honey when he 
was a baby and lay concealed in a cave, 
while his angry father searched for him. 

It seems that the gods had their troubles 
as well as human beings in those days, 
and Jupiter's father, Saturn, who was king, 
was very much afraid of his own children. 

An oracle had told him that they would 
displace him ; so he settled the matter, as 
he thought, by swallowing them as soon 
as they were born. 

This unfortunate habit greatly distressed 
Saturn's wife, Rhea, and when Jupiter was 



Odd Notions about Bees. 159 

born she gave him to the care of the 
Curetes, — a Cretan tribe who were very 
true to their charge. 

They used to dance about the young 
god and drown his cries by rattling bronze 
weapons, so that Saturn might not hear 
and so find the royal infant. Jupiter was 
fed upon milk and honey by the 
Amalthea and the bees. This is 
end of the story, so far as bees 
are concerned, but perhaps you 
will be glad to know that when 
Jupiter grew up he married Metis 
whom we would call Prudence, ; 
she administered a draught to Father 
Saturn, which caused him to disgorge all his 
children. Then Jupiter and his disgorged 
brothers, Neptune and Pluto, made true 
the words of the oracle by dethroning their 
very unfatherly father, and dividing his 
kingdom among them. Jupiter took the 
heavens for his portion, as you know, 
while Neptune took the sea, and Pluto 




160 The Bee People. 

the underground world, or the realms of 
the dead. 

A great many people think that when 
bees are about to swarm, a loud noise 
will prevent them from leaving, and they 
clash on tin pans, or ring bells, or blow 
whistles, or do anything they can think 
of to make a hullabaloo. No doubt they 
sometimes equal the uproar made by the 
Curetes about the infant Jupiter. 

Honey was very highly valued in ancient 
Greece and Italy, and that which came 
from Mount Hymettus was specially prized. 
Hymettus is a mountain in Greece, near 
Athens, and used to contain famous bee- 
pastures. 

A bee -pasture, you know, is a place 
grown over with flowers ; and Mount Hy- 
mettus was said to be rosy-purple, it was 
so covered with heather blossoms. 

Hybla, an ancient city on the sea-coast 
in Sicily, was also very celebrated for its 
honey. 



Odd Notions about Bees. 161 

Probably the best bee-pastures in the 
world, to-day, are in California. * A great 
deal of fine honey is made there. 

Honey is not valued as highly as it used 
to be, because we now have sugar. But 
you can imagine that before the sugar- 
cane was cultivated, and when people had 
no sweet but honey, it was a most im- 
portant and valuable article of food. 

Honey is very good for children and 
for old people. It is more digestible than 
sugar, and most children like it better. 

You remember how "The queen was 
in the parlor eating bread and honey," and 
I think it was a very good occupation for 
a queen or for anybody else. 

A great deal of poetry has been written 

about bees, and there is one little verse 

that everybody knows. It was written by 

Dr. Watts. 

" How doth the little busy bee 
Improve each shining hour, 
And gather honey all the day 
From every opening flower." 
ii 



l62 



The Bee People. 



The most interesting thing we have 
learned in modern times about bees is 
their relation to the flowers. Some plants 
cannot set seeds at all without the help 
of the bees, and they are very great helpers 
in gardens and orchards. 

If you want your trees loaded with 
apples and pears, be sure to put a bee- 
hive near the orchard. 

Near Boston, where a great many cucum- 
bers are raised for market in the winter 
in glass houses, hives of bees are kept 
in the houses to fertilize the cucumbers. 
If the little bees did not go from flower 
to flower carrying the pollen from one to 
another, a large force of men would have 
to be employed to brush the pistil of 
each cucumber blossom with pollen. 





XX. 

BOMBUS, THE BUMBLE-BEE. 

A PIS MELLIFICA is not the only 
^"^ honey-bee in this country. 

Indeed, she is not even a native of Amer- 
ica, but was brought over from Europe 
more than two hundred years ago. 

The bumble-bees, like the Indians, 
belong to America. They were 
here when Columbus discovered 
the New World. 
Red ciover. There are a great many bum- 
ble-bees in different parts of the 
world, and more than sixty species 
in North America. The habits of them 
all are very much alike, however, so if we 
make the acquaintance of one, we shall 

know something of all. 
163 



164 The Bee People. 

The bumble-bees do not live in hives, 
and they do not store up honey in beau- 
tiful waxen combs. 

Generally they have a nest in the ground, 
though sometimes they choose a woodpile, 
or other convenient place. 

Bumble-bee nests are often found in 
haying time. When the grass is being 
cut the horses step on the nests, when out 
fly the angry bees and sting the horses and 
the men and boys. 

Sometimes there are so many bees' nests in 
a meadow that it is difficult to get the hay. 

Madam Bombus makes her nest in a hol- 
low in the ground under a tuft of grass, 
and it is so near the surface that one could 
easily dig it out with the fingers, if it were 
not for Madam Bombus herself. 

Put your fingers into her nest and see 
what she will do. 

She will sting you on the nose for one 
thing. She seems fond of stinging people 
on the nose. 



Bombus, the Bumble- Bee. 165 

Queen Bombus does not have a whole 
hive full of workers to help her when she 
starts her nest. 

On the contrary, the workers and drones 
die in the fall, and the queen is left all 
alone. She crawls into some snug corner 
and sleeps through the winter. When 
spring comes she wakes up, stretches her- 
self, smells the early flowers, feels the warm 
sun, and away she flies. She first goes in 
search of a home. 

You can see her in the springtime fly- 
ing about, hunting carefully for a good 
place to make her nest. 

When she has found a home that suits 
her, she goes to the flowers and gathers 
pollen. 

From morning until night she works as 
hard as she can tugging large balls of pollen 
to her hole in the ground. 

What do you think she does with it? 
She has no waxen cells to store it away in, 
so she just piles it together in her nest. 




1 66 The Bee People. 

In this mass of pollen she lays her eggs. 
She always lays fertilized eggs early in the 
season ; but I suppose she does not feed the 
young bees very generously on bee-milk, so 
they hatch into workers instead of queens. 

Of course this is just what she wants. 
As soon as the workers begin to come out, 
she can stay at home and let them gather 
the pollen. 

The bombus is covered 
all over with hair, as you 

My Bombus. t , « i ^ r 

know, and has bands of 
yellow and black hairs across her body. 

The bombus that I know best has a yel- 
low jacket, and a broad yellow band across 
the top of her abdomen. 

The tail-end of her abdomen is black. 
She is a very pretty, furry bee, and like all 
the bombuses, her wings are dark brown 
in color. 

The honey-bee's wings are as clear as 
glass, and that is one way you can tell a 
honey-bee from a bumble-bee. 



Bombus, the Bumble- Bee. 167 

Well, Madam Bombus lays her eggs in 
the mass of pollen, and they hatch into 
little larvas, like those of the honey-bees, 
only not so small. 

You see, Madam Bombus has to do all 
the work herself; so, I suppose, it saves 
trouble to have the infants cradled in good 
pollen, so they can help themselves with- 
out troubling their mother. She feeds them 
on bee-milk at first; but later, I suspect, 
they have to eat their cradles. 

They grow fast; no doubt they eat a 
great deal of pollen. 

When it comes time for them to change 
into pupae, what do you suppose happens? 
1 do not believe you could guess if you 
tried a month. 

You see, they have no wax cells in which 
they can be bottled up. 

Queen Bombus does not cap them over, 
as the honey-bees do, and leave them to 
their fate. She cannot bottle up her babies, 
because she has no bottles. 



1 68 



The Bee People. 



I shall have to tell you the secret. 
'They bottle themselves up ! You remem- 
ber how the Apis baby, in its pretty waxen 
cell, spun a silk nightcap when it was 
capped over? Baby Bombus spins a whole 
nightgown. 

She eats a hole in the pollen about her, 
large enough to lie in comfortably, then she 
begins to spin, and does not stop until she 
has made for herself a yellow cocoon. It 
looks a little like the cocoon of a silkworm, 
only it is much darker in color, and the 
lower part is embedded in pollen. The 
upper part is sometimes quite clean and 
pretty. 

I looked into the nest of the bombus 
with a yellow jacket and a yellow band 
across the upper end of her abdomen, and 
this is what I saw. Just a pile of cocoons, 
you see. In each cocoon 





Botnbus, tbe Bumble- Bee. 169 

The larva lies curled up in its cocoon, 
with its head bent over, as you can see in 
this next picture. 

But in a few days it changes into a 
pupa. The young pupa is very pretty, 
and it deserves its name. You 
know pupa means doll; and if the pupa, 
when first formed, does not look like a 
bee-doll, I do not know what it does look 
like. 

I will try to draw you some pictures of 
these pupae, though no pictures can do 
them justice. They are as white as snow, 
and sometimes have pink eyes, though 
sometimes their eyes are blue. They look 
as if they had been very 
§3 beautifully carved from white 
ivory. You can see their 
little buds of wings held close 
to their sides, and their long white tongues 
down in front, and their pretty snow-white 
legs cuddled up close to their bodies, so as 
not to take up too much room. 




i jo The Bee People, 

Honey-bee pup^e are as pretty as these, 
but they are smaller and not so easily seen. 

Soon these pretty white " dolls" become 
darker in color, and soft hairs begin to ap- 
pear. Then their wings enlarge, the down 
has covered their bodies, their legs are strong 
and black, they are no longer "dolls," but are 
perfect bees and are ready to come out. 

All they have to do, is to bite a hole in 
the end of their cocoons, and step out. 
They are damp at first, and their hairs cling 
to their bodies ; but soon they are dry and 
fuzzy and as handsome as young bees 
ought to be. 

When the bees first come out, their 
jackets and the upper part of their ab- 
domens are white instead of yellow. 

I suppose they are tow-headed in infancy, 
like some other young people you and I 
know. But their white, baby hairs soon 
turn to a bright canary yellow, and in two 
or three days they would probably sting 
you if you called them "babies." 



Bombus, the Bumble- Bee. 171 

The worker-bees are only half as large 
as the queens, though they vary a good 
deal in size. Sometimes the eggs laid in 
corners, or under the large cocoons, hatch 
into poor little larvae, that have no chance 
to grow. So they make tiny little co- 
coons, and hatch out into f unn y_jBMfe == 
little bits of bumble-bees. Some-'^^^--" 
times these little dwarfs are no ADwarf - 
larger than honey-bees. But, I can tell you, 
they feel as big as anybody. They buzz 
about and gather pollen and honey like 
the other bees. 

Late in the summer Queen Bombus lays 
fertilized eggs that make queens. I sup- 
pose the larvae are fed on all the bee-milk 
they want, and so become queens instead 
of workers. Queen Bombus, also, toward 
the end of the summer lays unfertilized 
eggs, and of course these hatch into drones. 

Bumble-bee queens do not kill each other, 
and the bumble-bees do not kill their drones. 

After the queens and drones are hatched, 



172 The Bee People. 

they mate high in the air, and the queen 
stores away the pollen of the drone until 
next spring. 

When the cold weather comes, the drones 
and workers die, and the queen hides away. 

Some bumble-bees store up honey in 
the empty cocoons after the young bees 
have left them, but you can imagine it 
is not very good honey. Some bumble- 
bees make wax and use it to finish out the 
cocoons into better cells, or even to make 
a few coarse cells, or to mat together the 
grass over the nest to keep the rain out. 
But my bumble-bees had no wax at all 
in their nest, and at the time I saw it they 
had not stored away any honey. 

The Bombus family is very small com- 
pared to the Apis family, for sometimes 
there will be only a dozen bees in a nest, 
again there will be several dozen. 

Bumble-bees are very good play-fellows. 
If you want to have a good time watching 
the bees, catch one or two large bumble- 



Bomb us, the Bumble- Bee. 



I o 



bees in a net and let them loose on the 
window. They will not sting you unless 
you touch them. Even if they get on 
you, if you keep perfectly still they will 
leave without hurting you. 

You can give your pet bombus a drop 
of honey, or a little sugar and water, and 
see its long brown tongue lick it up. 

If you want to see it perform its toilet, 
you can breathe upon it gently. 

This makes it very angry, and it will 
buzz with its wings for a moment, then go 
to work and clean itself all over. 

Bumble-bees have a funny way of stick- 
ing out their legs at you, as if they meant to 
strike you. When you X 

come near one, out fly 21lR?™^!x 
its legs in quite a threat-^f^^^^Pjjjfl^ 
ening manner. """ ^=~ ^-:_-^^^ 

Honey-bees do this too, but not so much 
as bumble-bees. 

The very best place to watch bees is 
in the fields. 



1 74 The Bee People. 

If you sit down near a nice patch of 
red clover, you will be very sure to meet 
a bombus before long. 

She will not disturb you, and you can 
get as close to her as you please, so long 
as you do not touch her. You can watch 
her put her tongue into the little clover 
tubes. She is very fond of red clover, and 
she can get its honey, but the honey-bee 
cannot, because the clover tube is too long 
for Miss Apis's tongue. The red clover 
depends upon the bumble-bee for fertiliza- 
tion, and an interesting story is told of how 
clover was introduced into Australia. 

There was no red clover in Australia 
until the white settlers took the seed there 
and sowed it. Then the clover grew, but 
bore no seed, so of course it did not amount 
to much. People said, what is the matter 
with the clover; why will it not go to 
seed? 

I wonder if you could have told them ? 
Finally somebody told of the relation be- 



Bomb us, the Bumble- Bee. 175 

tween the bumble-bees and the clover, 
and said the clover needed the bees, — 
for there were no bumble-bees in Australia. 
So some nests of bumble-bees were taken 
to Australia, and the clover then bore 
seeds. 

I once had a bumble-bee 
that did not know how to 
get nectar from red 
clover. 

It was hatched in 
my room, and fed on 
for several days. 

Then it was given some clover, jl but it 
seemed to be too old to learn. It r' wanted 
the nectar, for evidently it smelled it, and 
it tried to get it, but it could not find 
the openings into the flower tubes. 

It was very funny to see poor Miss 
Bombus run her tongue along the outside 
of the little flowers that make up the 
clover head. She found the opening to 
one or two of them finally, but she never 




176 



The Bee People. 



became an expert at gathering clover- 
nectar. You see, she began to practise 
too late in life. 

You will sometimes see bumble-bees 
asleep on the flowers toward night. 
Perhaps they have wandered too far 
from home; perhaps they think flower 
petals make a very dainty bedroom. 
Often the bees kept in a room will take 
a nap on a cloudy day. 

You can tell when a bee is asleep, 
because it looks as if it were asleep. 

It does not shut its eyes, of course, 
but it looks very droopy and sleepy. 

Look at that bee on the iris bud; 

would n't you know it had gone to sleep ? 

You can get a great deal of pleasure 

from the bees by watching them out of 

doors. You can see them go into different 

kinds of flowers and find out just how 

they take the nectar. 

Bees never sting unless you go too near 
their hives or else touch them. You can 



Bombus, the Bumble- Bee. 177 

watch the bees out of doors and in your 
room as much as you please without the 
slightest danger. 

You can keep bees in the house and 
feed them on different kinds of flowers. 
They have to learn how to g^t the nectar 
from a new kind of flower. They will 
try and try until they have found the 
right opening. 

When once they have learned their way 
into a flower, they can usually go at once to 
the nectar in another flower of the same 
kind. 

You see, they experiment until they find 
out what to do, and then they remember. 




Life and Love.. 

By Margaret Warner Morley. With profuse illus- 
trations by the Author. Price, $1.25. 




Margaret Warner Morley has written in "Life and Love" a book 
which should be placed in the hands of every young man and woman. It 
is a fearless yet clean-minded study of the development of life and the 
relations thereof from the protoplasm to mankind. The work is logical, 
instructive, impressive. It should result in the innocence of knowledge, 
which is better than the innocence of ignorance. It is a pleasure to see a 
woman handling so delicate a topic so well. Miss Morley deserves thanks 
for doing it so impeccably. Even a prude can find nothing to carp at in 
the valuable little volume. — Boston Journal. 



For sale by booksellers generally, or will be sent, postpaid, on receipt 
of the price, by 

*A.C. McCLURG AND CO., Publishers, 

CHICAGO. 



A Song of Life 



By Margaret Warner Morley. With profuse illus- 
trations by the Author and by Robert Forsyth. 
Price, $1.25- 




A most charmingly instructive book ; and so beautifully explained is 
the great subject of life that the little ones for whom it is intended cannot 
but receive great benefit, while the older ones will also learn much. Some- 
thing of flower life, something of fish life, of frogs and of birds, and a 
chapter on human life, form the subjects of this book, all told in the grace- 
ful manner of a womanly woman whose love for Nature has given her a 
keener insight into Nature's secrets and a greater ability to impart those 
secrets to others with the ease of face-to-face talks than is vouchsafed to 
many people. — Boston Times. 



For sale by booksillers generally, or will be sent, postpaid, on receipt 
cf the price, by 

*A. C McCLURG AND CO., Publishers, 

CHICAGO. 



J 



LB D 



■ 

ZBn 











005 462 92V7 



